


Nitro, West Virginia

by nasri



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Boy King of Hell Sam Winchester, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Sam Winchester, Demons, Hunting, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pre-Stanford Era (Supernatural), Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers, Semi-Dark Dean Winchester, Slow Burn, Stanford Era (Supernatural), Torture, some light murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:34:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 50,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23224858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nasri/pseuds/nasri
Summary: There’s a lot that could send Dean Winchester to hell. The list probably starts with gluttony and all-you-can-eat western buffets, traversing wrath and rage and bar fights and steady trigger fingers and ending somewhere here, with his little brother staring up at him in invitation.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 47
Kudos: 119





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> John Winchester kills Azazel before Dean ever catches on to his disappearance and Sam takes what he is owed.

Dean is desensitized to adrenaline. His father raised it out of him and hunting did the rest, but his heart still pounds when Sammy speaks.

“Come with me.” Sam isn’t seven years old and achy anymore. He’s six foot with a few inches left to go, sporting bitten fingernails and chapped lips. But that whisper is just the same as he curls into Dean’s side and presses his cheek to his sternum, tapping his fingers to the steady thrum of his brother’s heartbeat.

“We could work it out. You wouldn’t need - ” He takes an uncharacteristic pause. “You wouldn’t have to stop hunting, but you could keep it to the coast. And I don’t need to stay in dorms you know, we could rent an apartment somewhere off campus. Far off campus, even. I don’t mind a commute.” Sam is seventeen and textbook brilliant with some street smarts on the side, but he’s still young and hopeful and Dean breathes it in.

“I’ll talk to Dad,” is all he says, but Sam grins like he’s promised him his own white picket fence. Dean runs his fingers through his hair, scratching at the base of his skull.

“It could be perfect,” Sam whispers. He grew up faster than his appetite and Dean feels his brother’s ribcage spill open with every breath. “It really, really could be.”

“Go to sleep, Sammy,” he says, because Dean’s never put much stock in perfect.

—

John is bent over the hood of the Impala, a bottle of Valvoline oil open on the ground beside his feet. He pulls back after a moment, his hand resting against the grill, and Dean looks away. “What is it?”

He gazes up at the treetops filled with screaming cicadas and waits for John to answer his own question. He takes off his gloves, shoving them into his back pocket, and crosses his arms over his chest. Dean has spent most of his life standing toe to toe with his father’s chalk lines and staring him down. Now, for the first time, he allows himself to avoid his gaze, to stare resolutely at the tires, worn and wanting for replacement.

“You want Sam to be happy?” He asks finally, his tone a touch too casual.

Dean grits his teeth. “Yes, sir.”

“Then don’t go. He wants normal, Dean, he wants to be out. And that’s not going to happen with you following him around like a puppy on a leash.” John caught on to their particular brand of codependency years too late, because Dean has known since he was six years old that little Sammy hung his stars and not a word from John would ever change that.

“He asked me to.”

“Because you’re all he’s ever known. You want my advice, Dean?”

He doesn’t, but he nods anyway.

“Let him try. Give him a semester to be like all the other kids and if after that he still wants you there, don’t you think he’ll call?”

He hates the way John says it, like a fact. “I’ll talk to him,” he says.

“Kids get homesick, Dean.” His father calls after him. “But they always get over it.”

—

“Come with me,” he whispers for the hundredth time that night.

Dean closes his eyes and for the hundredth time he answers, “No.”

“You don’t have to stay for his sake. He’s just going to leave, you know he will.” Dean’s arm has gone numb with the weight of his brother, but in the morning he’ll be on a bus to Palo Alto so Dean allows himself a while to memorize the outline of his brother’s body against his chest.

“Dad’s not going anywhere. He needs a partner.”

“He’s never needed a partner,” Sam whispers into his collarbone. “It was just easier than being a father.”

Normally Dean would snap back; he would demand that Sam apologize and take back his lead water words. But Dean knows that he is nervous and fear makes him just a sight more vicious.

“You’ll be alright,” he tells him. “You’re so fucking smart, Sam. You’ll do fine.”

“Just tell me what he said to you,” Sam says, moving to sit up, looking down at him with glassy eyes. He traces his finger along Dean’s outstretched arm, pausing at the crook of his elbow and the flat of his wrist. “How’d he convince you to stay?”

“He said I’m always an interstate away, and you can call my name at any time.” It’s not exactly a lie, it’s just the way Dean prefers to think of it.

For a moment Sam looks like he might keep pushing, might pull out his debate team voice with counterarguments listed along his outstretched fingertips, but instead he sighs and lays back down at his side. Dean throws an arm around his shoulders, holding him tight for a moment before letting go again.

“If you don’t answer I’ll whip your fucking ass from here to Sacramento,” Sam whispers and in the room next to theirs, passed out drunk on a motel comforter, their father gets his way.

“Keep dreaming, kiddo. Ever heard of freshman fifteen? And that’s for out of shape computer nerds. You’re gonna be closer to freshman thirty with a sixty percent drop in muscle mass.”

Sam snorts. “Listen to you, terrified that I’m just gonna keep growing.”

“You can’t possibly.” Sam already has an inch on him, maybe more. “You’re already fucking Gigantor.”

“Watch me, Dean.” He says, stretching out long against his side. “Just watch me.”

—

Sam calls him from his dorm room, bare but for two twin beds and his duffle bag worth of possessions. “My roommate’s not here yet,” he tells him. “But supposedly his name is Josh.”

Dean groans in sympathy. “There’s aren’t any decent Josh’s in the world, Sam. Good luck with that.”

He laughs and for a moment the connection is clear enough that it sounds like he’s beside him in bed with his shaggy hair fanned out against the pillow. It takes everything Dean has to close his eyes and say, “So tell me about your first day, college boy.”

“Classes don’t start for another week, it hasn’t been my first day yet. It’s just orientation and scheduling. But uh,” Sam pauses, like he’s parsing words in his head. “Everyone’s really friendly here. But sometimes it’s almost a little too much.”

Dean smiles at that. “College nerves,” he says. “Everyone’s probably amping their social game to make up for it. Things will settle down soon. You’ll make sense of it.”

Sam sighs through his teeth. “They’re all just kids, Dean. They’re so young.”

Sam was admitted early, graduating at seventeen with a list of high schools a half mile long, but Dean knows exactly what he means. “Not all of them will be. Hunters don’t have a monopoly on growing up too quick.”

He doesn’t reply and for a while they’re silent, breathing into phone receivers like digital clockwork. Dean doesn’t dare close his eyes again, too easily lured into the illusion of his brother at his side. Instead he traces the textured motel ceiling with his finger, following a fractal of plaster until it meets the drywall.

“I should sleep,” Sam says eventually. “I have an early start tomorrow.”

“Me too,” Dean says. “Check out is at nine.”

“I’ll call you once classes start.”

“Yeah, you better. Have fun up there.”

Sam breathes deep and exhales through his teeth. “And you be careful.”

“I always am, Sammy.”

Sam knows that it’s not true so he laughs, soft enough to miss, and whispers goodnight.

—

It’s four weeks before John steps through the door in an Oklahoma strip mall town and tosses the keys to the Impala onto Dean’s stomach. He groans, opening his eyes and running a hand through his hair. “That your way of telling me you’ve got a lead?”

“No,” John says. “That’s my way of giving you the car.”

Dean laughs as John collects his things, shoving dirty laundry into his military kit.

“I’m serious,” he says. “You’re a good hunter, Dean. And we’ll do the world a hell of a lot more good apart than we will together.”

He frowns, sitting up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means we’ll cover twice as much ground when there’s not two of us wasting our time on one salt and burn. Anyway, I bought a truck from a hunter in Edmond and I’m heading to Idaho. Bobby mentioned something over the border in Texas. Maybe you should give him a call.”

Dean watches him with narrowed eyes. “You been planning this long?”

“A little while,” John says.

“Counting down days until Sammy was gone, huh, so it’s not quite child abandonment?”

“Really, Dean?” He asks with raised eyebrows. “You want to do this?”

Dean absolutely fucking does want to do this. He wants to throw the keys so hard against John’s head that his skull shatters. He wants to rip into these shitty polyester sheets and scream until the hotel staff call the cops because goddamn it, Sam was right.

When he doesn’t respond, John says, “Just take the keys.”

And he does.

—

Sam takes six classes, the most his schedule can handle. Dean knows because he’s listed them off in order more than once, courses with names like _Contraband Capitalism_ and _Global Justice_. He joins exactly four separate societies and even starts applying for part time jobs.

“You know,” Sam says. “For the holidays.”

He has more things to do in a single afternoon than Dean has to handle in a week and he can’t help but wonder if he ever misses hunting. Sometimes, when Sam’s voice sounds a little strained and the streetlights outside his motel room are too bright to sleep by, Dean likes to imagine that he fills all that time for a reason.

“So, college boy, how’s your Captain Planet class?” He asks, because he knows it makes Sam smile and also because he honestly cannot fathom what else a class on global justice could possibly entail.

“I have midterms coming up,” Sam says, but Dean already knew that. His calls have been less and less frequent, occasionally substituted for a single text message asking, _‘Alive_?’

“Well you better get to studying then or I’ll start calling you ‘college dropout’ instead.” They don’t talk about the holidays. They don’t make plans to meet half way in the border towns of New Mexico where Dean spends too much of his time, or to call on Christmas Eve. Sam is settling. He’s falling into place, just like John said he would.

Sam snorts. “Not a fucking chance.” He’s silent for a moment and Dean thinks he hears a soft, static ridden sigh. “How’re you holding up? Going crazy yet being stuck alone with Dad?”

“Nah,” Dean lies. “He’s easy most days.”

“Easy,” he says, and Dean can almost hear the click of his teeth.

“You always were the problem child, Sammy,” Dean tells him in a mock soothing voice.

“Yeah, the problem child. My cardinal sins of wanting to go to school and join little league.” 

“Well,” Dean begins, picking at a suspicious burn on the polyester comforter. “You prove us wrong then. Rock those midterms.”

“Prove Dad wrong,” Sam corrects him and Dean smiles despite himself.

“Go to bed, kiddo.” He’ll take this bullet for the both of them.

“Yeah, alright. Night, Dean.”

—

Dean adjusts pretty damn quickly to life with the Impala and the tape jack spin of Robert Plant’s voice for company. He knows how to time his drives now, pulling over into highway rest stops instead of motels, bunking in the back seat and washing up in a bathroom sink. For the first time in his life, Dean doesn’t have a lonely little brother to answer to if he gets caught in fog or takes the scenic route, no father to set their schedule in stone.

The charm of independence wears off sooner than he’d thought, so Dean begins killing time between big jobs with little salt and burn’s that Bobby sends his way, taking out half a dozen creepy crawlies in the span of a week. John has always been efficient, but Dean is young and inexcusably reckless and his numbers climb higher and higher.

“I thought you were in Nebraska,” Bobby says, his voice distinctly disapproving even through the static.

“I was in Nebraska. Yesterday. Now I’m back in New Mexico. So do you have anything or not?”

“Don’t you think you deserve a break?” Bobby always was the good cop to John’s bad.

“Honestly, Bobby,” he begins, picking through the tray of cold fries balanced on the seat beside him. “What the hell would I do on a break that I don’t already do when I’m hunting?”

“I don’t want to know what it is you get up to, boy,” he says and Dean laughs. “How about you go visit that brother of yours?”

Dean’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. He has no plans to visit Sam, not in Palo Alto, not if he can help it. Their family may have ‘self-destructive’ encoded in their genetics, but Dean likes to think he still has the dregs of his survival instinct left intact.

“He doesn’t need me distracting him from all the shit he has to do. Besides, I’m gunning for something good. I’ve had enough poltergeists this week. Got anything solid for me?” Jobs that leave black blood caked in his fingernails stop his ears ringing. Getting his hands dirty has always been the closest Dean could ever get to meditation and while Bobby might not understand, Dean thinks his father would.

—

Dean’s pretty well convinced by the whole innocent until proven guilty bit. It’s all he remembers from seventh grade social studies, written in black script against a laminated photo of a nineteenth century scroll along with all the other constitutional foundations that they were forced to spout like leaky faucets. 

Or that’s what he tells himself when he’s passing along a little strip of Georgia coast and stumbles upon the trail of two werewolves masquerading as humans. They’re doing a far better job of it than Dean ever has, touting their nine to five jobs complete with forged doctors’ notes for their oddly consistent absences. So he waits and he watches and thinks that maybe he ought to just leave them be.

Five weeks later he returns to the ocean air and reedy grass to a body count of eight. Dean sits on a set of wooden porch steps at half past five in the afternoon, loads silver bullets into his forty-five, and thinks he should’ve known better.

They keep their windows unlocked and Dean shimmies into the living room through the lace curtains that pool along the floor. He looks around the little townhouse, a suburban dream of oak furniture and throw pillows, and helps himself to the box of Oreos left open on the counter. He leaves a trail of chocolate crumbs on the tile and sits back against the granite to wait.

She’s humming an old ballad from a hair metal band as she comes through the door, dropping her keys in a little ceramic bowl before her shuffling feet stumble to a halt. “Who’s there?” She whispers.

Dean steps out from the kitchen doorway, takes aim over the heavy barrel of his silencer, and watches as she crumples to the floor. Her husband isn’t far behind, so Dean kicks his boots up onto the coffee table and waits. He doesn’t see much point in mopping up the blood twice.

He burns their bodies in the deep woods off interstate sixteen where the mountains keep the roads empty most days. The clearing reeks of gasoline and something specific to human hair as smoke spills up towards the sky. These parts of Georgia are steady, oak leaved perfection, even in the winter, so Dean takes the long way back.

—

Sometimes Dean is pulled from sleep, REM deep, to the phantom whisper of Sam’s voice in his ear. He wakes instantly and with a pistol held steady in his hand. There’s never anything there but an empty hotel room and day old take out containers, but Dean still checks his salt lines and shines a flashlight into the shadows each night before he reaches for his phone.

“Hey, Dean.” Sam’s always awake, no matter what God forsaken time of night he calls.

“Heya, Sammy.”

They don’t talk much on nights like these. Sam will briefly summarize his week, declare his classes fine and the topics interesting. Dean will call each hunt nothing more than he can handle, and add that whatever state he’s in at the time is hands down the country’s worst fucking state, no competition.

“I thought Florida was the worst state,” Sam will always say.

“Florida is the worst state. It’s a standing, non-refundable title. When I say worst, I mean second worst. Come on, Sam. This shit’s self-explanatory.”

“How’s Dad?” Sam asks, veering away from their usual routine. It sounds a bit forced, like he’s asking for Dean’s benefit.

Dean knows he should make up an anecdote or two, anything to hide the fact that he hasn’t seen his father since that overcast afternoon in Oklahoma, but instead he sighs and says, “Who knows. He’s out at a bar, probably picking up women far too young for him. He has a thing for redheads lately.”

Sam groans into the receiver. “Can you not?”

“You asked.”

“Yeah and I regret it immensely.”

Dean laughs and Sam huffs out a breath and eventually they fall silent for long enough that Dean begins to feel the distant sting of sleep from behind his eyelids. “I should let you go and get back to bed. Long drive tomorrow.”

“Be careful.” It’s what he always says.

“Yeah, you too.” 

—

Dean left his first girlfriend at fourteen. She was a year older than him, a good little Texas girl who wore Daisy Dukes to math class and was twice as smart as he was. Her name was Christianne, but she went by Christi.

“Like the city,” she’d say, though Corpus Christi wasn’t much of a city back then. She repeated her little introduction to John over dinner while Sam set Dean with a wide-eyed stare.

“Do you know what it means?” Sam asked, innocent and sweet over a spoon of runny mashed potatoes.

“What what means?” Her drawl was enough to have Dean half hard under the table.

“Corpus Christi. In Latin, it means the Body of Christ.”

She turned to Sam as if she’d only just noticed he was there, her chin resting on her open palm, elbows on the table. “But Christi ain’t Christ in Latin.”

“Well it is,” Sam said. “Just conjugated. Technically it’s genitive, possessive.”

Christi laughed at that, bright and interested. “I’ll go around calling myself JC from now on then.”

They dated for four months and Dean sometimes thinks that it wouldn’t have lasted half as long if she didn’t pay Sam such gentle attention, always asking questions and leaning into his soft spoken explanations.

“How old is he, again?” She’d asked once, in the process of unhooking her own bra.

“Ten.” Their frantic attempts at exploratory mutual orgasms were likely not the best time to talk about Sam, but Dean never did miss an opportunity to brag about his little brother.

“He’s brilliant, you know.”

“Of course I know.” Her nipples were lip-gloss pink, so much lighter than the browns and dusky reds he’d seen in porno mags.

“You’ll have to keep an eye on him when he’s older, he’ll be trouble.”

Dean never corrected her and come May they left Texas and with it little Christi and her Daisy Dukes.

“Sorry to break your heart, Dean.” John had said, patting his shoulder with one hand on the wheel. Sam laid stretched out with a sketch pad in the back seat, pretending not to hear a word. “Young love is always tough.”

Dean left Sam for the first time a year later. He accompanied John on a four-day hunt out in snowy Vermont, leaving Sam alone in a hotel room in upstate New York. It was Christmas break and Dean’s gift had been the opportunity to do more than just tag along on quick and dirty one-hit-wonders. This time, John had promised, he would get to pull the trigger.

They drove at night, hours into the mountains on unlit roads, and Dean laid in the back seat struggling to swallow against the knot in his throat, wiping away tears when he thought his father wouldn’t notice. Dean could’ve counted on his fingers the nights he’d spent away from his little brother. They were limited to rare sleepovers, high school parties that he was still too young for, and the occasional hunt that ran just a few hours past sunrise. Vermont felt like a lifetime from Albany’s sprawling suburbs and for three painful nights, he cried himself silent while John slept.

Dean’s little heart broke and broke every time he had to leave Sam behind on a hunt, and now he’s twenty-three and he thinks he might know what their father meant by young love.

He calls Sam from the road, his phone left balancing on his thigh and set to speaker.

“Hey,” Sam answers, sounding pleased. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’m doing an etymology course. It keeps reminding me how much you suck at Latin.”

“First of all,” he begins, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel. “I’m awesome at Latin. Second, funny you should say that, I was totally just day dreaming about Christi. Remember her?”

Sam groans his name. “Man, that’s gross. She was like twelve the last time you saw her.”

“You were like twelve,” Dean corrects him. “She was like sixteen. Or almost sixteen, anyway.”

“You’re digging yourself deeper,” Sam says. He’s silent for a moment, before finally he starts to laugh. “Corpus Christi,” he breathes. “Who would’ve thought that she’d be the high school girlfriend you actually remembered.”

Dean shrugs, fully aware that Sam isn’t there to see it. “Memories are weird, man. What can I say?”

—

Dean learns the hard way that it’s best to hunt witches from afar. He spent a week and a half coughing up surgical staples and picking shrapnel from his teeth before he swore to never stand face to face with a witch ever again.

So now he’s propped up against the railing of a Chicago high rise in Lakeview, with his hands wind bitten and the city living up to its name. She’s old, with a resume spanning the deaths of scorned lovers, business rivals, even students decades ago at the University of Chicago, pruned away like the flowers she keeps on her windowsill.

Dean barely feels safe with three buildings between him and the witch’s glass paned windows, armed with a tactical scope that spans for miles. The wind burns his cheeks pink and his fingers tap restlessly against the locked trigger as his sights begin to wander. He moves his scope in a slow arch around the block, watching people along the street like Sammy used to watch birds through binoculars in the spring.

He sees a woman walking along black mirrored windows, fixing her hair as she catches a glimpse of her own reflection. He sees a man with shopping bags and a child at his feet. He sees school kids in checkered red skirts and black uniform ties, and dogs pulled along retractable leashes.

He wonders if the witch thought that this life would ever be worth it. She’s had sixty-four years of red-cloaked children and fruit stand vendors and pasta dinners served at church. Dean can’t imagine it’s worth dying for, but then again, maybe he’s just missing the puzzle piece that completes the picture.

The sun has gone down by the time she unlocks the door to her spotless, glass covered apartment. Dean pauses to inspect her through the lens, taking in her grey coiffed hair and the laugh lines around her mouth. She looks content, like a woman who’s lived a lifetime without the weight of the guilt that she deserves to carry.

Dean grits his teeth and flips the safety off. He has never prayed a day in his life, but before he pulls the trigger, he takes a second to hope that one day Sam might look like that.

—

Dean dreams of putting away dishes at an old house in Drexel, Missouri. It was a sixties nightmare of shag carpets and sunburst clocks, with yellow patterned linoleum countertops. Sam was seven, going on eight, a difficult age where school teachers asked too many questions and the good old CPS threatened to make weekly home visits.

Dean was never quite sure why they stayed in Missouri as long as they did, especially in that little cattle and corn field town. He used to think that John must’ve had a good reason, but he’s not quite sure anymore.

He reaches blindly across the flimsy bedside table and texts Sam his usual: _Awake?_

His phone buzzes a moment later and he answers to Sam laughing, “It’s only eleven here, you old man.”

“I’ve been working all day, college boy.” he grumbles into the receiver.

“Yeah?” Sam asks, suddenly softer, like it’s guilt he tastes in his mouth. “Then what are _you_ doing awake?”

“Who knows.” Dean sets the phone to speaker and rolls over onto his side. “Hey, I was dreaming about that house we had in Missouri.”

Sam exhales, not quite a sigh, and says, “I loved that house.”

“It was a piece of shit though. And that town.”

Sam hums. “Yeah, I know. But you learned to cook there in our first real kitchen. Made cornbread from scratch.”

Dean had forgotten all about his cornbread, baked in an old cast iron mold shaped to look like corn stalks. “Yeah.” He grins up at the ceiling. “And chilli.”

“You still make the best damn chilli, cornbread on the side.”

Dean closes his eyes to those linoleum countertops, to the scrapes and bangs of dishes in the sink. “Tell you what,” he says. “Next time I’m in California, I’ll make us some.”

Neither of them mention Sam’s shared dorm room kitchen or the fact that Dean will never see it.

“Well now you’ve given me a craving,” Sam says.

“Wendy’s is open twenty-four hours,” Dean reminds him.

“Not in Palo Alto. Our’s closes at midnight.”

“Sammy,” Dean begins, sounding appalled just so he can hear Sam laugh, expectant and sweet, through the speaker on his cellphone. For a brief, exhausted moment, Dean wonders if he should record it. “You’ve picked the wrong part of the country to settle down in. No Wendy’s chilli at two in the morning?”

Sam is still laughing when finally he says, “Tell me about it. I might as well be in Drexel.” 

—

John’s first real hunting lesson came at the age of ten, with a wendigo dead at his feet, fingers shadow-long and curled inwards like spiders’ legs.

“These aren’t the hard ones,” he’d said. “You can put a bullet right here and not think twice.” John tapped his own forehead, right between his eyes. “It’s the ones that look human, they’re the ones that’ll get to you.”

It was true for a while, for ten years, maybe more. But paranoia has a way of blurring a man’s priorities and living on adrenaline slowly blends out the rest.

He meets up with David Callaghan outside of Reno. Dean still remembers him from when he was a child, the big city hunter with a wild stare. He’s gotten old now, with deep set lines around his eyes and thinning hair. He’s gotten slow.

There’s a shifter prowling street corners at all hours. He keeps a low profile, killing off gutter kids and little else, but David caught sight of security footage showing lily white eyes through a static haze and he knew he had to call in for backup. It takes them the better part of a week and a half to track him down, a tedious exercise in Dean’s ever dwindling self-control.

He’s changed three times since they started on his trail and each time he looks young, barely a kid of sixteen or less. It ends with David missing the shot, looking away at the last second, so Dean rips the gun from his hands and aims for the thing’s heart.

David runs a shaking hand over his eyes, turning from the body of a boy with wide hazel eyes. Dean shoves past him and says, “I’m hitting the road. You’re on clean-up duty.”

“You didn’t flinch,” David calls after him and it sounds almost like an accusation.

“It was a monster.” 

“Yeah, but he looked like a kid.”

“Not to me,” Dean assures him. “I’ll see you around, Callaghan. Hopefully next time, you’ll be a better shot.”

—

Sam lands a summer internship at a law firm in San Francisco. It’s an hour long commute each way, a dozen or so stops from campus, and for nine weeks he doesn’t hear his brother’s voice. At first, Sam sends him essays in the form of text messages written in an air conditioned train car at eight o’clock at night. He tells him about the paralegal he shadows and the briefs he edits, pages long and painful to read. But soon his paragraphs fall to single lines and then they stop altogether, replaced by a daily check-in: _Alive_.

Dean lets him pull away, dutifully answering every text, telling himself that once school starts up again, he will call just once a month. He won’t hold his little brother to anything more than that.

To fill in the waves of Sam’s radio silence, there’s a hunter in San Mateo who retired to the sunny side. He answers phones and keeps books on hand and he’s willing to do Dean a favor. He gets an email in the fall when Sam moves out of the dorms and into a rented house with a group of boys and two girls who are plain and ordinary. They all study political science or pre-law or a derivation of the same. They string white Christmas lights around their windows in the summer time and buy frozen food in bulk. They’re college students, they live on Blueridge Avenue, and it seems like everything Sam has ever wanted.

Dean never really thought of home as something static. It’s always been the snow in Lexington, Massachusetts and the rotting old cabin outside of Holden, Maine. His home is the swamp land of Atlanta, the old factory towns of Indiana, at six thousand feet above sea level on the streets of Colorado Springs. Sam’s home is Palo Alto, California. He reminds him of it with every quick ended phone call.

“Where are you now?” Sam asks.

“North Carolina. In some hellhole called Elizabeth City.” Everything smells vaguely of mildew and oncoming storms. He thinks he might just like it here.

“I’m finally home,” Sam tells him. He stretches out and groans into the receiver and says, “I’ve been dreaming of it all day.”

“Same here,” Dean says and Sam laughs, low and faint.

—

Dean spends a week in Iowa alternating between a series of haunted houses and a waitress’ little twin bed. She introduces herself as Lily, but he’s met enough kids stuck in truck stop towns to know that it probably isn’t her real name. She’s not what he usually goes for, not by half. Lily is all of five-foot-two with dark hair and dark eyes and freckles dotting every inch of her skin - but she doesn’t have much of a filter and she knows exactly what she wants and maybe Dean is a little into that these days.

“I’m not really looking for a thing right now, if you know what I mean,” she says not an hour after letting him through the door. “But I wouldn’t mind a repeat if you’re around. You’re very pretty, you know.”

Dean watches her dig through the fridge, wearing a fading band t-shirt and absolutely nothing else. “I think you mean devilishly handsome.”

“Oh no.” Lily emerges victorious with a can of Miller Lite that she tosses in Dean’s direction, ignoring his grimace of disapproval. “I mean pretty. You have very feminine features. But it’s okay, I’m into that.”

He spends four consecutive nights in her cramped, yellow washed bedroom. She never asks why he returns smelling of smoke and burnt plastic and Dean wonders if she’s really just not that interested.

They share a cigarette in bed on Dean’s last night in town. She holds it to his lips, waits for him to breathe in, and says, “This won’t be me, soon. I’m getting out.”

“Yeah? Where you gonna go?”

“California,” she says, watching the ceiling. Dean rolls his eyes and she nudges his shoulder, asking, “What’s your problem, Kansas boy? The coasts too done up for you?”

“I didn’t peg you for a stereotype, that’s all. Gonna go chase your dreams of being an actress?” 

“Nah, us girls are already actresses. They start you off at birth.” She sighs smoke. “I don’t know, all the lost kids want to hit Cali. It must be for a reason, huh.”

“Think they ever find anything?” Dean hasn’t spoken to Sam for nearly the entire month of November. He tries his very best not to count days like hours. They exchange their usual text messages, a solemn, single word proof of life and little else. He’ll cash in his call soon though, the second he’s out of Iowa.

“I guess it depends on the kid.” She leans over to shove the remains of her cigarette down the mouth of an empty beer can. “And what they’ve lost. You ever think of going?”

“Yeah,” he admits, unable to stop himself.

“So why didn’t you?”

“Realized it wasn’t for me, that’s all.”

“It’s a good thing too,” she says, pressing her fingers against his shoulders. “You’d have as many freckles as I do after about a week and half. You’re more suited to the Bible Belt, baby. Too humid for a tan.”

She doesn’t kiss him goodbye in the morning. Instead she runs a hand along his cheek and says, “You fuck like a married man, you know. Like you’re feeling guilty over something.” 

Dean leaves her standing in the doorway, watching the Impala reverse onto the loose gravel road as he drives down towards Kansas. He needs some southern heat, so he doesn’t stop until he’s passed the boarder to Oklahoma and finds a motel with art deco windows and peeling paint. He sends Sam a text: _busy?_

His phone starts ringing before Dean is finished unlacing his boots.

“So, college boy,” Dean answers, sitting back against the facade of the motel headboard, the base nailed to the wall. “You been able to charm a girl down there yet? Not a freshman anymore, gives you the full range of lower classmen to choose from.”

Sam snorts and Dean smiles. “You know better than that.”

And he does, but he wants to hear him say it. “Got a boy then?”

“You know better than that, too.”

When Sam was sixteen he announced he was attending junior prom, inexplicably set on the tacky themed decorations strung up in his rural southern New Jersey high school. Dean had been blessed to attend his senior year in central Kentucky, where school dances were generally replaced with fires held at the Red River Gorge with a menu of cheap bourbon and Kirkland vodka.

But Jersey was just buttoned up enough to be as stereotypical and sober as the pages of a high school yearbook and Dean couldn’t understand the appeal.

“I’m going,” was all Sam had to offer, even after John shouted himself hoarse over the growing importance of their weekend hunting trips.

He asked a girl named Rachel to be his date and Dean can still remember how she looked, barely tall enough to make it to Sam’s shoulder. She wore her hair tied up with ribbons, colored to match her blouse collars. Dean knew it was silly, a waste of time and their father’s dwindling patience, but while John was away on a job in Pennsylvania Dean bought a disposable camera and a little corsage of purple flowers to go on her wrist. Sam had hugged him tight, just a touch short of painful, while Dean teased him for his abysmal new haircut and the length of his bangs.

Sam came home from school on Friday to find their father packing his bags, explaining in a rush that he had a monster to hunt, with or without their help.

“Well,” Sam had said, sitting cross-legged on the couch and listening to the sound of the engine run. “I should return the tux, then. Wanna catch a movie tomorrow?”

“Wait, you’re not going?”

“No point,” Sam had said with a vicious sort of grin. “Dad’s not around.”

“You decided to go to prom so you could spite Dad?” And of course he had, planned every little detail just to drive John fucking crazy. “What about Rachel?”

“She can still go.”

“You can’t leave a girl on her prom night, dude.”

“Why not?” Sam asked, a genuine question. “Not like we’ll be here in the fall. And it’s junior prom, it barely counts. Anyway, I’ll pretend I went, kind of works out better this way, saves me the trouble. You’ll play along for Dad, right?”

“Sure, Sammy,” Dean had said, and he repeats himself now, with just a little more certainty. “Sure, Sammy, sure I do. Just thought you might’ve done a bit of experimenting. You know, the whole rumspringa gig.”

Sam laughs, nine hundred miles away.

“What?” Dean asks, thumbing at the cheap stitched lining at edge of the comforter.

“Rumspringa?”

“I know things,” he says, and Sam laughs again. “Also,” he admits, “I may have met a girl once - ”

Sam groans into the receiver. “Please, no.”

“Hear me out,” Dean begins. “It’s not as bad as you think.”

He doesn’t mention Lily and when he finally falls asleep it’s to dreams of pastel ribbons and Depeche Mode tour shirts twisted into knots beneath his fingers.

—

The first man he kills is something altogether different from the creatures he hunts in the night, but Dean can see the similarities in their silhouettes all too clearly.

He’s heard of hunters going bad all his life - a few rotten eggs, John always said. But he still remembers Bobby standing in his doorway, newly retired with a house full of books, and saying, “It’s no anomaly, it’s just what happens when you stay at it too long.”

John called him soft, hours later, sitting in the Impala with Dean at his side and Sammy in the back seat. He called him jaded. Now Dean thinks Bobby may have been right after all. Spending a lifetime fighting against death and never slowing it down, never once getting ahead, it can make a man’s thoughts go somewhat Machiavellian.

There’s a kid bound at his feet, like one of the old paintings of Isaac the would-be sacrifice, and Martin Creaser stands above him with wide eyes and says, “Winchester, you don’t get it. It’s just one kid and once it’s over he promised, said we can stop every monster the world over. Total extinction, don’t you see?”

Dean watches the way his knife lowers just a fraction of an inch towards the boy’s bare chest. After twenty-four years, he knows feral when he sees it. He shoots twice, one to the head and one to the heart, like his father taught him. He doesn’t miss and it feels just like killing a monster.

—

Most hunters have lost everything. It’s a common theme, one he sees over and over again in biker bars and on forest routes. John fits into their ranks better than he ought to, considering the two children he has living on opposite sides of the country, but Dean never did. He meets an old man in Tupelo who lost three sisters to a poltergeist. He was in the military, bringing weapons home from Germany, spending his nights in small towns on the French coast. He missed the war by just under a decade, but he saw the aftermath. When he returned home it was to news of arson, a house burned to ash and all his family with it.

“Never believed them,” he says. The locals call him Gator and Dean never asks why. “My youngest sister sent a letter, said the new house had a devil’s chill. I knew it weren’t no arson.”

He spends three days in town, always finding him at the same spot in the same roadside bar. They drink shit liquor and Gator tells him stories with a distant stare until one night he turns to him and says, “The only hunters that can get out are the ones with somewhere left to go.”

“Bad luck,” Dean says. “I was born into it.”

“So you can leave. You’re not your Daddy, you don’t have to let it take you over. ‘Cause you still got somewhere.”

“Why’d you join the military?” Dean asks, quick to change the subject.

Gator shrugs his massive shoulders. “Just what boys did back then. They paid alright, didn’t look for much but a decent head on your shoulders. It was that or coal mining.”

“Well we don’t have much in the way of coal mining anymore and I don’t think I’m suited to the military.”

“Not suited to the military?” Gator asks with a tobacco stained smile. “What do you think you are, boy? How is it you think soldiers are made?”

Dean wants to argue, wants to insist that this life is something altogether unique but instead he asks, “And you think that’s something that can be undone?”

“Not undone,” he says. “But left behind, if you try hard enough.”

He imagines Sam’s shared house in Palo Alto. He imagines the wooden scratches on his kitchen table, his chipped coffee mugs. He tries to picture him sorting through piles of laundry, of how he would stand with a backpack slung over one shoulder. He thinks of the life his brother must lead, with such clockwork simplicity and beautiful morning routines. 

“I’m not sure it’s something I want to leave,” he says.

“You’ll wish you did,” Gator tells him. “Boy, if you survive this, you’ll wish you did.”

—

Dean dreams of Nitro, West Virginia. It was just one summer spent pent up in a rented old farm house with yellowed, grassy fields stretched dry in each direction. Their neighborhood consisted solely of an old widower, who taught them to tie strings around June bugs and watch them fly in circles above their heads.

John was playing a long game, spending his days an hour away in Ashland, Kentucky and coming back with tired, dark eyes, leaving Sam and Dean to the smothering heat of Nitro. There were no local kids for Sam to befriend, no girls for Dean to chase. It was just the two of them, alone with the crumbling rock wall fences that lined the scummy creek and the symphony of insects that played them to sleep at night.

A store down the road sold ice cold cokes from the bottle for fifty cents apiece. Every day at noon they’d walk down the beaten, windy path - naming landmarks of broken power lines and tractor wheels as they passed - and split a bottle between them.

Sam was going through a bit of an animal phase, catching frogs to inspect the spots on their backs, comparing them to Dean’s freckled nose. He would sketch cardinals on hole pressed fax paper and they would lay in the grass each night as the fog rolled in, waiting for headlights to run along the trees. It was as close to an apple pie, southern boy life that Dean would ever get, but Sam always preferred it up north.

The sir’s and ma’am’s fell heavy on his tongue - little Sammy always did have ivy league written across his teeth. Stanford was a surprise, because by the time Sam turned sixteen Dean had spent years imagining him in the dogmatic Princeton towers or the icy Harvard hills, where it was cold more often than not and the sun fell early in the spring.

“Hello?” The angles of his accent are all Bay Area now and he’s certainly not alone. There’s chatter in the background, a party maybe, perhaps a study group and he breathes in. “Dean?”

He clears his throat, because the way his brother says his name never fails to choke him silent. “New phone,” he says, finally. “To replace the two-zero-eight number. Figured you’d want it.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, and the voices all fade into silence with the sound of a door clicking shut. “Yeah I do, thanks. How are you?”

“I’m fine.” He doesn’t tell him where he is and he doesn’t ask either, because it’s not something Dean can really bear at the moment. Instead he sticks to what they used to have, to a mumbled, “You remember those June bugs?”

“Beetles,” Sam says and Dean can hear the smile at his lips. “They’re June beetles.”

“I don’t give a fuck.”

“I remember them,” Sam continues. “The cicadas too.” They would shed their skins on tree bark all the way across the south, fascinating little Sammy when they crunched beneath his fingertips. 

“No June bugs in Cali, huh?”

“Not really,” Sam says.

Dean’s eyes are sandpaper dry from sleep and his little Pennsylvania motel room is ice fucking cold. His fingers are numb and the curtains at the window are pulled tight.

“What time is it?” He asks, wishing more than anything that they were back in Nitro, laying side by side on the front lawn, Sam’s ankles twisted with his own as heat lightning lit up the sky.

“Nearly ten,” he says. “You should be asleep, regardless.”

“You know me,” he sighs into the receiver. “Can do without.” Sam always needed his eight and a half hours, where Dean could make do with four and two cups of coffee served black. He wonders how many minutes he’s spent watching his little brother’s breath steady and fall, his lashes still childishly long and fanned closed.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you have to.”

Dean soaks in the familiar note of exasperation, a touch of concern that hasn’t really changed. “Anyway, I’m gonna let you get back to it. Just figured I’d check in, you know?” Dean says. “It’s been a while.”

“Yeah.” He closes his eyes to the sound of his brother’s exhale. “Hey, Dean. Just, Nitro, right? You were thinking about Nitro?”

“Just thinking in general,” Dean says.

“You know, you have my address.” Sam sounds rushed.

“Night, Sammy.” Dean says, pretending the stars aren’t falling from his carefully constructed constellations.

“Night, Dean.”


	2. Chapter 2

He visits Ellen’s bar on the backroads of Nebraska and tries to convince himself it isn’t because of Sam. Ellen never seems to get any older, never seems to tire, and she greets him with an uncharacteristic hug and a quiet, “Thank God you got Sam out.”

Her own daughter took to hunting like it was hide and seek. “She sneaks off on her own most of the time. I can’t put a stop to it anymore.” 

Joanna Beth, two years younger than Sam and just as beautiful. Ellen sits across from him in stony silence because they’ve been around long enough to know just what that means. Sam might have left and taken the stars with him but Dean thinks she said it just right. Thank God, thank God, because he won’t die like this.

“How’s he liking school?”

“Alright, I guess. He was always weird like that.” Dean hasn’t heard Sam’s voice since May. Most days he’s too busy staying alive to let it bother him, but tonight, with his palms flat against the grubby bar tables and with Ellen pouring them doubles faster than he can drink them, he lets it linger just a bit.

“And John?”

“Alive,” he says. “I’ll hear from him in six weeks or so when he needs help on a job.” It’s been twice that since he’s heard from John, nothing if not unreliable. 

Ellen looks away and Dean thinks he knows exactly what she’s thinking. “He loves you,” she says, finally. 

Dean’s not so sure that John has it in him anymore, though he doesn’t care to say it. 

—

John opens the car door and thumps his back in a trademark greeting which leaves just enough distance between them for comfort and enough contact for propriety. 

“You heard from Sam lately?” He asks.

“Not really.”

John tilts his head with the slightest touch of disbelief, but he doesn’t linger on it long. “Well come on then, get your keys and let’s go bag ourselves a wolf.”

When they hunt together Dean always gets them separate motel rooms. John never mentions it, he certainly never suggests sharing, and sometimes Dean wonders if it’s because he finds himself in the same position - unable to sleep with another body so close by. 

So he sits on the edge of his bed and watches his father linger in the doorway. His fingers flutter uselessly against the wooden frame, like he’s human enough to falter when facing his eldest son. 

“Listen Dean,” he says. “After this, I may not be easy to reach for a little while.”

“Alright,” he says. He doesn’t ask questions. Instead he returns John’s slight nod of affectionate acknowledgement and gestures for him to shut the door when he turns to leave. 

Dean listens for his father’s footsteps, counts them as he marches down the hall. When he hears the distant sound of a door click shut, he collapses back onto the bed with his cellphone nestled between his shoulder and his ear. 

“Bobby,” he says, not waiting for an answer. “Dad’s up to something.”

“Son,” he sighs. “What else is new? If your Daddy’s got dirty hands, you best leave well enough alone.”

—

Demon sightings used to be rare, to the point where Dean only half believed the stories Pastor Jim told of locked-room exorcisms held in church basements. These days, Dean has a little more faith. 

“Jesus, fuck.” He says, when the boy he picked up from a classy little joint in Providence turns to him with bedroom black eyes. 

Ordinarily Dean goes for women. This is primarily due to ease and odds, though he can’t deny how difficult it is to seduce someone when all he can do is compare them to his brother. It’s something he’s come to accept, over the years, that he’ll never be able to look a man in the eye and not think about how inadequate he would look next to Sam. Women never did inspire the same balancing of scales. 

Tonight he was riding off the stress of his father’s voice and wanted something he could bruise a little, a body to sink his teeth into. He’s a blonde north east stereotype, Newport raised in pastel polo shirts, out and proud to the family since his junior year in high school. Dean was able to ignore the fact that he worked in marketing and introduced himself as _Shaun with an h_ , because frankly he has a swimmers’ body with a little waist that Dean could fit his hands around. 

Dean flings himself towards his jeans, left crumpled and abandoned by the kid’s living room door, fumbling for his hunting knife. He feels manicured nails at the back of his neck, a steady hand holding him down. 

“No, no,” it murmurs into his ear. “I’m only here to deliver a message.” 

“First of all,” it says, gingerly taking a seat on Dean’s lower back, earning a gasp of, “Seriously?” as it shoves his face back against the floor. “You have terrible taste in men. I was traveling in a fucking Greek swimsuit model earlier and you were just not having it. But frat boy over here turned your head?” It clicks its tongue in disapproval. 

“Are you really here to comment on my sex life?”

“No,” it admits. “Though I wouldn’t object to being part of it.” 

Shaun’s body is draped down Dean’s spine, his lips trailing up the back of his ear. 

“Not a fucking chance.”

“I’m not surprised,” it says, pulling back. “But I am disappointed, Deano.” It shifts forward, carding its fingers through his hair. “Your father’s been busy, you know.” 

“He’s always busy,” Dean manages between clenched teeth.

“This is no time for your Daddy issues to resurface. I’m telling you because there’s people down south that want you to know. If John Winchester keeps walking this path, it will kill him. So consider this your friendly warning. Johnny’s up to something.”

Shaun screams at the devil’s pitch, sending black smoke through the central air vent, before his body slumps over him, a dead weight. 

—

Sam rarely calls anymore, so when his phone buzzes against the dashboard, Dean’s stomach turns. It’s gut instinct with no real fear behind it, but still his body reacts, unable to think of anything beyond skin walkers and shifters and goddamn fucking demons. 

“Sammy?” Sam might be safe and sound in California sunshine, but all Dean can see is the dark.

“Sam,” he corrects him. His is voice layered with a bit of static distance but Dean can still hear him smile. “What’re you doing?”

“Driving,” he says, setting the phone to speaker. “Just off the highway, probably have shit service.” 

“Yeah, sounds it,” Sam admits. “At least you don’t have our rain, right about now.”

“Not yet,” Dean says. “But I’m passing through the Dakotas so it’s bound to happen. Anyway, what are you up to?” It feels a bit forced, the way he has to ask. For seventeen years of his life he knew every inch of his brother’s. 

“Finals start next week. This is my study break.”

“Home stretch, kiddo. Just a few more semesters and then you’re done, right?” It’s been almost three years since his brother left, and he’s felt every second of it. 

“Not quite done, not really.” Sam’s response is almost whispered. “I’m applying to law school.”

“Oh,” he says, his hands tightening on the wheel. “Law school, huh? You hear back from anywhere yet?”

“Yeah, uh - ” Sam coughs to cover the sound of his voice wavering. “I took the LSATs early, did pretty well. So I got pre-admission to Stanford Law. I’m not sure I’ll apply anywhere else.” 

“That’s my boy.” Dean fakes a smile on reflex. “Well congratulations, little brother. Next time I run in with the feds, I’ll have them call my lawyer, all official like, and not just give them Bobby’s number.”

Sam laughs, crystal clear and a tiny bit relieved. “I was thinking more contract than criminal.”

“You can still pretend.” Sam’s always been a good liar, better than Dean anyway, and he can’t imagine law school will do any damage to that particular skill set. “So how long does that take?”

“Three years,” Sam sighs. “But it’ll be worth it.” 

Dean has ignored the looming date of Sam’s graduation, avoided thinking about it at all costs because of the horrible, nagging sliver of hope that came with it. At least now, he thinks, it’s settled. 

“Could you maybe, you know, tell Dad for me?”

“Don’t wanna break the news yourself?”

“Not particularly,” Sam admits. 

“Twenty years old and I’m still doing your dirty work.” 

“You probably always will be,” he says with a laugh, and God, does Dean have the fine end of that deal. He’ll be at Sam’s beck and call if it can ever make up for the fact that his little brother will bury him one day. 

“Well I’m proud of you, kiddo.” In a way he really is. Sam may have broken his heart, but he did the right thing, in the end, he didn’t call. 

—

Dean picks up a working girl in Boston without really meaning to. She asks to borrow his lighter outside a seedy South End bar and scrapes her manicured nails down his cheek when he cups his hand around the end of her cigarette. He’s pretty sure she’s coming onto him at the point where they’re tumbling through the door to his motel room with her stilettos dangling from her fingers. 

“Two hundred for the night,” she says against his lips. Boston is a college town these days, filled with frat boys who have money to lose. Dean spent the evening reaping the benefits of their tequila fuelled confidence with the end of a pool cue. 

“Why not?” he says. 

She’s shimmying back onto the bed, undoing her shorts for a bit of a show. “You really don’t have to,” he says, toeing off his boots. “I’m not that kinda guy.”

“You’re pretty,” she tells him, stretching pale legs against his sheets, her arms up above her head. “I wouldn’t do you for free but it definitely won’t - ” She pauses, her fingertips at the edge of his pillowcase, eyes wide when she pulls Dean’s hunting knife from beneath her head.

“Oh right.” He’s halfway out of his jeans. “Forgot about that. Well, you’re welcome to go. But believe me when I say that I’ve spent my life walking the line between paranoia and reasonable precaution, and a knife in arm’s reach is absolutely reasonable precaution.”

She runs her finger carefully down the serrated edge. “Red flag is an understatement.” She has a lispy coastal South Carolina accent, the note of a southern bell who couldn’t quite ring in the big city and traded out Seventh Avenue for Hannover Street.

Dean backs away, gesturing towards the door. “I’m not gonna force you.”

Her fingers are still moving up and down the blade when she glances back at him. “You have a lot of scars.”

“Yeah.”

“That one’s new,” she points to a set of claw marks on his shoulder. 

“About two weeks.” 

“You got a gun on you?”

“Always,” he admits.

“Payment in advance,” she says, bending over to slide the knife beneath the bed where neither of them can reach it. “Put it on the chair by the door, along with your gun. But if you ask me, you need a therapist more than you need to fuck.” She beckons him closer and Dean follows like a hunter, careful not to startle her. “And you know, I’m a pretty good listener.”

He hooks his fingers into the cords of her g-string, pulling it slowly down the curve of her hip. “You wanna hear my problems during foreplay?”

“Whatever you want,” she says, barely putting the effort into sounding breathy. He pulls her towards the edge of his bed, kneeling on the carpet with one of her knees hooked over his shoulder and an ankle resting heavy at the nape of his neck. 

“Well don’t you have manners,” she says. “You a banger, then?”

He runs his nose along the curve of her knee, looking up at her with heavy eyes. “Not too far off. But less _Gangs of New York_ and more _Wild Bunch_.”

“Right.” She sounds unconvinced and instead digs her heel a little harder into his neck, forcing his head forward. He glides a fingertip feather light over her clit. 

“Job’s not really the problem. I have a baby brother who’s studying to be a big shot lawyer out in California, getting ready to graduate from Stanford and jump right into law school.”

She falls back with a sigh which Dean thinks she’s probably faking. Her hair is auburn silk, free of peroxide dye, and in this light it looks just like Sam’s did at seventeen, dark and thick against the beige pillow case. 

“I love him like you’ve never loved another person in your life,” he tells her, pressing harder with his fingers, leaning down to trace his progress with the flat of his tongue. “But I don’t think I’m gonna be seeing him much anymore.”

She groans in frustration as he pulls away, for just a moment, to lick his fingers clean. “Why not?” She asks.

Dean’s not sure talking to a prostitute about his little brother is the healthiest thing he’s ever done, but he’s hard and the room already reeks of sex and his lips are tacky with the taste of her. “Because he was always alright with me doing my job as long as I was pulling the metaphorical cats from high tree branches. But after a while, it stopped being about the people I saved and started being about the monsters I killed.”

He slips two fingers inside of her, sitting back on his heels and watching her eyes flutter closed. “He’s a smart boy, my Sammy.”

He twists his hand to thumb at her clit and she kicks her foot uselessly against his side. He leans forward and uses his tongue like he’s hungry for it, listening to her breathing until suddenly she’s moving, forcing herself onto her elbows, cheeks flushed in blotchy red stains. “You think about your brother a lot when you have someone in your bed?” 

He reaches up to trace his fingertips along the swollen peaks of her nipples. “You said to talk about my problems. He’s about it.”

“What’s he look like?” She asks, falling back against the sheets.

Dean stills, considering. “He’s beautiful. I mean, he was. I haven’t seen him in a few years, but he was beautiful. Tall as a fucking giant, your color hair.” He leans forward enough to barely run his tongue along her clit. “High cheekbones,” he continues after a moment. “Olive skin, always tanned when I would just burn.” 

“Not so many boys call their brothers beautiful,” she breathes, catching his hand as he moves away and placing it back at her breast. “Maybe he’d say the same thing about you.”

“Maybe,” Dean says. “But he’d be wrong.” 

—

Demons don’t always kill the people they possess. They leave that job for Dean. They are always broken, taken apart in pieces and well beyond fixing. He did try, in the beginning. He would carry their limp bodies into hospital waiting rooms and call underground surgeons to try and patch up the damage but each and every time he failed to do anything more than cause them pain. These days, Dean doesn’t bother trying to smoke them out early just to save whatever poor kid they’re tearing down from the inside. These days, Dean needs information. 

“John Winchester is up to something,” he repeats, idly dripping its fingers into little bowls of holy water. “And that something ain’t exactly demon friendly, you’d be doing yourself a favor by cooperating.”

It gasps, a pained laugh. “Demon friendly depends on what side you’re on.” Dean presses back, hearing a finger snap like dry kindling. “You can’t do worse than hell,” it reminds him. “No matter what, you’re not worse than hell.” 

“Then you’re free to go back,” he says, reaching for the little book of exorcisms that John carried for so many years. He knows most of them by heart after six months of demon traps and sulphuric residue, but it still feels more natural to read, scanning each word until finally she screams.

The girl is still breathing, a sharp, rattling sound like her lungs are fluid filled and ready to burst. She can barely keep her head up, but he can see her eyes focus on the hunting knife in his hand. 

“Don’t worry,” he says, putting it down in exchange for his handgun. “It’s gone now.”

“Please don’t,” she whispers, her voice wrecked.

“Trust me,” Dean says, checking the magazine cartridge. “It’s easier for you this way.” 

It’s merciful, he thinks, it’s always a clean shot. 

—

Lightning bugs are something best left to childhood memories of cupped hands and glass jars. Dean never chased them as a kid, never stood and watched the sky light up in the summer time, but he made sure Sammy did. 

There aren’t many west of Kansas, but whenever they found themselves out east for a slice of summer Dean would wait until the sun went down before carrying his little brother outside to tumble through the lawn of a broken down rental or along the concrete lined parking lot of a roadside motel. 

These days, Dean lives an analogue life of hunting and sleeping and charging his cellphones along motel power strips, and he hardly stops to think of much at all until he’s pulled over on the Appalachian stretch of a Tennessee highway with lightning bugs hovering just above the guard rails.

When Sam got older, he used to catch them in old Smucker’s jars and watch as they slowly faded. They went out like little light bulbs, drained of power, falling from yellow to a pale gold, ending in sickly green. 

Dean reaches out, catching one on the tip of his finger. It blinks in rapid bursts, an S.O.S call, and he watches as it flies away. 

—

The Stanford commencement dates are posted online and Dean writes them down in his battered notebook, an appointment to keep in his usually calendar-free life. He shuts off every phone, even the burner with only one number saved, and drives west. He’s in northern Mississippi the weekend before and it takes him the better part of two days with a stop in Oklahoma where he gets barely any sleep.

They’ve spoken sporadically for the past few months. It’s usually at night, when one or both of them are forced awake by memories or nightmares or a combination of the two. Sometimes, Sam just stays on long enough to check that he’s breathing, that he hasn’t already been done in by the creepy crawlies. Other times he’s wide awake, buried in textbooks until well after midnight. 

He catalogues the changes in his voice every time he calls, the vein of strength and confidence, the sharpened edge to his west coast inflection, the lofty pitch of his sighs. He sounds like an adult, until he says his brother’s name and then he’s seven years old again, clutching at fistfuls of grass and watching it rain down around them.

Dean wants to surprise him, to hear him say his name with all the awe of a child, and so he drives. 

—

He never gave much thought to how Sam must look until he finally sees him, three inches taller and laughing like he’s a goddamn civilian. His hair is too long, falling into his eyes while a girl with red painted fingernails fixes his cap as he bends to her level. But oh, he looks happy, and if Dean had one ounce of belief in angel wings that’s all he would’ve prayed for. 

Dean sees the double take, watches Sam’s eyes scan the crowd and fall back to him, his lips parting to whisper his name. He tries to smile, a slight shrug of his shoulders in explanation and in seconds Sam is at his side, pulling him into a hug. 

“You’ve gotten tall,” is all he thinks to say. But he wants to tell him that he’s grown up, that he doesn’t look like the sharp edged little boy who he left at a bus stop in San Antonio. 

Sam laughs into the skin of his neck. “You’re just shrinking,” he says. “Old age.” 

Dean takes a moment to breathe him in, to adjust to the fact that he no longer reeks of motel shampoo and mint chewing gum. Instead he smells like aftershave and fabric softener. 

“I can’t believe you came,” Sam says finally, pulling back but holding him at arm’s length, his fingers digging tight as if he’s afraid Dean might make a run for it. 

“We never went to your high school graduation, so I figured I’d make an effort. Sorry Dad couldn’t make it.” 

“You’ll regret it once the speeches start,” Sam says ignoring any reference to their father, happy to pretend that he plays no role in his Malibu Barbie life. 

Over his shoulder Dean can see the little clique of black robes that Sam had been standing with whisper between cupped hands, watching them with wide eyes. He knows without asking that they don’t have a clue who he is, that they’ve never heard his name before. California’s Sammy is an only child. He’s happy and ordinary and lives with friends who bicker over taking out the trash. He has a gym membership that he actually uses and he mans the grill at their weekend barbecues. 

“Hey,” he says. “You should be getting back to whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing before this thing starts. Go on.” 

“No, it’s alright, I can-”

“The cute blonde looks lonely,” Dean says, shoving him back towards his friends. “And I need a drink.”

“I don’t think they allow alcohol in here.”

“When has that ever stopped me?” Dean asks with a wink. “Now go on. I won’t leave until it’s over, so I’ll see you on the other side.”

Dean watches from the back of the open arena, leaning against the rail on a set of bleachers as each name is called in alphabetical order. Sam is a giant on the stage, shaking hands and ducking his head when a group of kids scream his name from the back. He has a colored sash draped around his neck and little braids of gold and green at his shoulders that shift and bounce as he walks. Dean doesn’t know what they mean, but he imagines it must be a good thing because with Sam it always is. 

He watches him turn as he reaches the stairs, searching for someone in the crowd and for the first time that day Dean sees a glimpse of his little brother beneath the civilian caricature of the boy he loves. He looks, for a moment, just like a hunter.

The flood of graduates disperse onto the campus grounds, standing beneath wilting willow trees and pear blossoms as they take their family photos in choreographed little lines. Sam isn’t hard to spot in the crowd. 

“Well, congratulations. First graduate in the family, breaking a nice winning streak.” 

Sam rolls his eyes and throws himself into another hug, whispering, “Thank you,” into the shell of his ear. 

“Listen,” he begins, pulling back. “I know you’re probably just passing through, but could you hang around for a few hours?”

“You’ve got celebrating to do, kiddo. You don’t want me pinned to your side.” John’s voice echoes in his ears. 

“No, I - look I already told everyone I wasn’t going out tonight. So maybe we can catch up, just us, you know.” Dean looks away and Sam is parting his hair with one hand, a nervous gesture that he never quite broke. “It’s been years,” he says finally.

“Alright,” he agrees, leading him towards the Impala, double parked in the crowded campus lot. “You manipulative little shit.”

“Gonna get even better at it,” Sam says, with a little shove to his shoulder blade. 

“I don’t think law professors will be as easy as I am. They don’t remember what you looked like as a six year-old.” 

“No,” Sam agrees, playing thoughtful. “But they’ll be easy enough.” 

—

Dean sits on the hood of the Impala and watches Sam roll up his slacks and dig his feet into the shallow sand that built up in dunes near the boardwalk. He knows he’ll be shaking it out of the lining for years to come, but as he tilts back his head and stares up at the cloudless evening sky, he thinks it’s probably worth it. There’s a bonfire half way down the path that feeds a bit of light onto an otherwise blind stretch of beach, the distant roar of music plays from an open car door. 

“You attend a lot of those?” He asks, tilting his head to the side. “Or were you too lost in your books?” He knows the answer already, he can see it in the healthy color of his skin, in the hazel shine of his once dark hair. 

“I went to one or two.” He looks California raised, like he’s never touched the Atlantic. “You know, I didn’t think I’d get sick of sunshine until my first semester here. And I missed seasons more than I thought I would.”

“Sounds like all you needed was a quick trip up to Washington state.”

“Yeah?” Sam laughs. “Just a quick twelve-hour drive.”

“You have the time now, don’t you?” He asks, trying for casual, for a bit of that distance they’ve built up over the years. “School doesn’t start for a few months. What else have you got planned?”

“Well,” Sam begins, digging his fingers into the sand. “I’m moving out of the house I’m in. I had a few part times and I’ve been saving up, so I’m going to, I don’t know, I guess I’ll go apartment shopping. I just feel like it’s time for my own space.” Sam has spent his entire life trying to justify the things he wants. 

“Settling down, huh?” He says to the sea. The thought sends Dean’s nerves twitching and he shimmies back onto the hood, resisting the urge to tap his feet against the grill. Living cooped up in a Palo Alto townhouse sounds like his idea of hell. Most days, the thought of settling in one city, in one damn state when there’s the stretch of the Midwest in front of him makes him dizzy with dread. 

“Well, I don’t know how you do it.” He hears a bit of a drawl in his own voice, brought on by too much alcohol and Sam’s reluctant smiles. “All this school stuff.”

“I worked hard for it, you know?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I do.”

He’s quiet for a moment, tracing his fingers in idle patterns through the sand. “Stay the night?” Sam says, finally. 

Dean thinks it’s the cruelest thing he can ask, to wake up at his side and see his brother in the grey hue of morning light and then expect him to be able to walk away. 

“Sure,” he says. “Too drunk to be driving anyway.”

Sam smiles. “Especially in Dad’s car. Not unless you have a death wish.”

Dean snorts, forgetting for a moment everything that little Sammy still doesn’t know. “Well,” he says. “Sounds like you’re driving home then.”

“Hey, I don’t have a death wish either. Better you than me.”

—

The little terraced house that Sam shares with his roommates is empty when they return. Dean has spent years imagining it, inventing every knick and detail, so when Sam finally flips on his bedroom light Dean smiles to himself and shakes his head. 

There are fresh textbooks littered at the base of a full bookshelf, legal tomes without a crack along their spines. His mattress is large and stretched across the floor without boxsprings to stack it high, blue bedsheets spilling carelessly over the edges. He has binders and papers stacked in messy piles along his desk and in all the space of his college bedroom there isn’t a single photograph, post card, or vacation trinket. 

“Alright, Kaczynski.” He says, shucking his jeans with fumbling, whisky-clumsy hands and throwing himself onto the mattress. “A fucking poster wouldn’t hurt.”

Sam smiles, pulling off his socks and stumbling back towards the light switch. “Never broke the habit,” he admits. “I kept expecting to have to fit it all into a duffel.” 

It breaks Dean’s heart a bit to hear, but Sam is switching off the lights and collapsing down at his side before his loose tongue can think to say it. “Jesus, you’re still a furnace,” Dean groans, his shoulders pressed back into the cool drywall.

“I’ve missed you,” Sam whispers, sudden and soft.

John isn’t there to tug them apart, to scold them into a safe six inches of space between their bodies, so Dean wraps his arms around his suddenly big little brother and tucks his chin over his shoulder, feeling Sam swallow heavy and thick. “Yeah, kiddo. Me too.” 

Sam falls asleep within minutes, his breath slow and even, but Dean is too drunk to do anything other than watch his eyes flicker beneath his eyelids and to wait for the exact moment his lips part. If he were sober, he wouldn’t be watching his brother sleep while harboring lightning fast fantasies about waking him with his lips to his throat, with his fingers slipping under the waistband of his boxers. He imagines and imagines, a hundred scenarios that all end with Sam licking into his mouth, with his little brother being just as fucked up as he is. He doesn’t remember looking away or falling asleep, just daydreams turned to nightmares, fed by whisky neats and body heat. 

They don’t say goodbye, not really. Dean wakes first, untangling himself from Sam’s orbit like it’s muscle memory, and avoiding any hungover roommates as he slips into the hallways and searches for the bathroom. He showers under failing water pressure, lingering just long enough to wash the tacky layer of sand and brine from his skin. 

He intends to slip out the door with his bag and a stolen packet of pop-tarts but Sam is already sitting at the table with a coffee mug clutched in his hands. 

“I bet California has plenty of monsters.” He says, as Dean pauses in the doorway.

“Yeah, I bet it does.” 

Sam doesn’t respond, just nods his head without turning to face him. He thinks there should be something more than this, that it should feel like the riptide it really is. But instead he taps his fingers against the doorframe and he turns and walks away.

—

“Hey there, Deano.”

He knows, this time. He can see the demon in its grin. “Blonde again,” he says, taking a sip of his drink as it sits down next to him, wearing a college student, complete with a pale blue skirt and a white crop top. 

“I have a type,” it admits, spinning on the stool to face him. “So news down south is that you’ve been digging.”

“With not a lot to show for it.” Dean is suddenly glad that he started off the night with some number seven instead of whatever hipster fucking IPA they have on tap.

“Well, honey, I thought I made things pretty clear. You were supposed to go to your father for answers, not lower a wire into hell.”

“Don’t trust either of you,” he says and it laughs, sounding every bit like a college girl with a fake ID. 

“And you probably shouldn’t.”

Dean’s tumbler is smudged with finger prints and smells vaguely of chlorine and chemical disinfectant beneath the bite of alcohol. “You said they wanted me to know. What else did they want?”

It shrugs, a camisole strap sliding down its pale shoulder. “I’m just supposed to put the word out, and tell you that something was brewing.”

“And that my father would die.”

It nods. “And your father would die.” 

The bartender seems blind to them both, shuffling around with a towel in hand and glazed eyes, wiping off bottle after shining bottle lined along the wall. Dean knows he’s being played. The demons are holding their cards close to their chests and it’s his hand that’s up.

“And what if I just leave it be?”

It smiles, eyes sliding to black. “And let Johnny die?”

“If he’s set on this, do you really think I could stop him?”

“Maybe not stop him, but I imagine you could help.”

“Or,” he says, biting back bile. “I could keep hunting, saving people. Doing what I’ve always done.”

“Visiting your little brother,” it adds, and Dean hates it a little for how confident it sounds.

“I don’t want him involved,” is all he says. Sam is his only worthwhile legacy and Dean will kill to keep it that way. 

The demon stands, smoothing its little polyester skirt until it lays flat against its stolen thighs. “Sounds like I have my answer then. Peace for Sammy, is that how it is?”

“Don’t call him that.”

It presses a kiss to his cheek, sticky with lip gloss, and turns towards the door. 

—

He hates the feeling of dirt in his teeth, hates the grit and grind of it. There’s mud smeared across his lips from where he hit the pavement and his molars catch and pull on every microscopic little grain of sand. 

“Give it back.” He’s perhaps a little more formidable now with the heavy butt of a pool cue in his hand, standing over Dean with a halo of light at his back. The parking lot is almost empty, save for two cars and the distant shadow of the Impala. 

“Money’s mine,” Dean says, wiping at his mouth. “Thought you and your buddies agreed.”

“They’re gone now.” He speaks like a farm boy that never left his own postcode. “So give it back. You didn’t win it fair.” 

Dirt rumbles like an avalanche through his eardrums. “You came at me with a pool cue while my back was turned,” he points out. “I wouldn’t call that fair.” 

The second Dean is on his feet, the farm boy is swinging again, aiming for his face this time instead of the base of his spine. He’s big and slow and still fairly drunk so Dean bats the cue from his hand and has him on his back with barely a sound. He straddles his hips, watching his eyes widen because pretty boy is suddenly a little too close for comfort. If Sam were here, he might laugh at that. He’s not though, so Dean starts punching. 

He struggles and squirms and tries his best to block his face with fists raised in a parody of self-defence, but Dean is quicker, he’s stronger, and there’s no little brother here to stop him. The farm boy moans the pitiful sounds of a dying animal and he’s fairly certain that if he calls an ambulance now, those eyes might be saved from their shattered sockets.

He doesn’t call an ambulance. Instead he stumbles towards the Impala, blood washing the grit from his teeth as he climbs into the driver’s seat. He waits until he hits mile marker one, crossing over into Arkansas, before he makes the call. “Looks like a bar fight,” he says. “You better get here quick.”

The young woman on the phone asks if he’ll stay with the man until the paramedics arrive. “Of course,” he says. “I’ll wait right here.”

He ends the call with a press of a button before flinging the whole damn phone out the window. The sun is rising along a perfect, flat horizon of corn stalks and wheat fields. He pulls the sun visor down to shield his eyes and turns the stereo on with a flick of a button. The cassette begins right where he left off, with the scratchy transition of snare drums and the eerie pull of _White Rabbit._

Sam hates this song and Dean begins to sing.

—

Sam is calling him. Dean watches his phone vibrate against the seat of the Impala, _Sammy_ printed in bold across his screen. He doesn’t answer it and Sam hangs up before it ever goes to voicemail. His brother may be working towards the devil’s own profession now, but the thought of hearing his voice makes Dean sick with a kind of self-loathing that he just doesn’t know how to beat.

He’s always enjoyed the adrenaline kicks, something he learned as a teenager with shaky hands, but now he thinks he might crave it. And it’s not the aftershocks either, not the blind relief at making it through another hunt alive, not the promise of an exhausted night’s sleep. Now it’s pulling the trigger, the kickback at his wrist, the solid barrier of bone against a hunting knife. 

He thinks of calling John, of asking what it feels like to him when he watches bodies burn, but Dean thinks he already knows the answer. Instead he pulls into a deserted parking lot and kicks his feet up against the passenger side dashboard with cheap whisky lifted from a Safeway in Arizona. He’s a few fingers into the bottle before he finally works up the courage to call Bobby. 

“You lookin’?” He asks before Dean can even speak.

“No, I’ve got a good trail. Just calling to check in.”

“Well I was half asleep before you decided to interrupt.” 

Dean smiles against the rim of his bottle. “Sorry about that.” 

“How you doing, boy?” Bobby may play blind half the time, but he’s always looked at Dean like he’s made of plexiglass. 

“I don’t know,” he admits. 

He can hear him digging through the fridge, the hollow click of a glass against the tin countertop. “Getting tired?” 

“No,” he says. Dean takes another swig for courage before adding, “Just the opposite.” 

The comforting symphony of movement stops, replaced by the low hum of Bobby’s voice. “That’s not a good sign,” he says, finally.

“Didn’t think it was.” Dean knows bad when he sees it. His dreams are still bloody and quick, but they’re not nightmares anymore. 

“Maybe you should take a break, boy. Head out west, see that good for nothing brother of yours.” 

“Good for all that legal trouble, soon enough,” Dean says. He doesn’t mention that he’s just come from the sunny side, four months slipping away like coral sand between his fingers.

“Yeah, like I said. Good for nothing.”

“I’ll think about it.” There isn’t really all that much to think about. His brother spent his whole damn life begging Dean not to hunt, to stay home, to switch the safety on. Soon enough, he’ll look at him and start to see a monster. 

“Do,” Bobby says. “Really think.” 

—

Dean spends almost five years lying about their father. Sam only ever remembered to ask a handful of times, an afterthought of, “So where’s Dad? He’s not breathing down your neck, is he?” 

It’s just so easy to excuse his absence, because John always was gone more often than not and Sam believes every word.

He’s not sure why he did it, why he didn’t call Sam up the second John slammed the door behind him and tell him that he was right, that their father raised a hunter in lieu of a son with no intention of keeping him. It might be pride, or it might be something a little worse than that. 

Sam is law school busy and John is following a trail that will lead him straight to hell, so when he gets laid out by a set of ghouls between the bayous and strip malls of Louisiana, he doesn’t really think to call. He ends up checked into a hospital with an array of minor injuries and a pretty hefty concussion, kept under constant surveillance by an elderly nurse who threatens to break his legs too if he doesn’t stop trying to get out of bed. 

“Alright there, Annie Wilkes. Give it a rest.” Dean is admittedly a tiny bit charmed. 

He doesn’t sleep well in hospitals and he sleeps even less when his head is pounding to the beat of a war drum. So he spends the night with the television playing infomercials on repeat. He thinks of the Impala, parked on the edge of an old country road a few miles south of here, and wishes he could get his hands on the wheel. 

Dean sees a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, and even in a hospital where the floors are running at all hours, he feels the slightest spike of adrenaline at his fingertips. 

“Hey there, Hotlips Houlihan,” he says, keeping his voice pitched low to avoid disturbing the old man asleep behind the curtain on the other side of the room. 

“You’re not tired?” She asks with her crackling tissue paper voice. 

“Not really,” he says. 

“Headache?” 

“Not a smidge.” His temples throb with every word but Dean isn’t willing to let himself go to the pull of prescription pain medication in the middle of a hunt.

“I know a lie when I hear one, boy.” Her accent is subtle and deep, not quite right for Louisiana, and it makes him ache for Nitro.

“Honestly, I’m good. Pain meds don’t sit well with my stomach, anyway.”

She takes a seat beside his bed and looks him up and down like it’s a military inspection, the way John used to look when the hunt was over and all that was left was getting rid of the bodies. “You didn’t write down an emergency contact.”

“Nope.”

“Would you like to give me one?”

Dean smiles, but it takes effort. “It’s good of you to double check my paperwork, but trust me, my family’s well enough not worrying.” 

“It can be for the file.” 

“As lovely as this town is, I don’t expect to be back here.” All he really wants is to watch enthusiastic television presenters attempt to cut a variety of unsuitably solid objects with stainless steel kitchen knives and lick his wounds in peace. 

“Well the Lord can’t say I didn’t try.” She braces her hands on her knees to stand and just as she reaches the door she pauses with her hand against the doorframe. “Just so you know, boys like you are always back. And one day that body of yours is just gonna give up and we don’t have the budget to be tracking down John Doe so that body is gonna be turned into a police case file and then to ash, and ain’t no one ever gonna know who it belonged to.”

“Well I’m hoping my body would come with a wallet?” The ringing in his ears is loud enough to force his eyes closed.

“Won’t do no good, Ronald Hubbard.”

Dean can’t help but smile. It is definitely one of his better aliases. He’s not sure if it’s the concussion or the distant whisper of the television or the arthritic curve of her knuckles but finally Dean says, “Give me a pen.” 

He’s out of the hospital by noon the next day, exhausted and dying for a burger. It’s two more and a handful of dead ghouls before he finally gets one and after that he sleeps for days in the humid shadows of a coastal motel. It used to be his favorite part of hunting, the deep exhausted sleep of a gravedigger. 

Dean wakes to rain like hail against the windows, and for the first time in weeks he takes stock. He sets a few cellphones to charge, scrubs his hair until he feels slightly less greasy and downs an entire bottle of water in a handful of breaths. He kicks back against the headboard with the remote to the shitty rabbit-ears television in hand and out of the corner of his eye he sees the steady blink of electric red lights from the flip phones set against the wall. 

“Ah, fuck.” He calls Bobby without checking the messages because really he just doesn’t have the energy. 

“Guessing you’re alive then,” Bobby says. 

“Yeah. Hospital call you?”

“No,” Bobby says. “Why? Should they have?” 

“A nurse bullied me into giving an emergency contact. Yours was the first number I could remember.” 

“Couldn’t give them one of your own damn numbers?”

Deans runs a hand over his face and reminds himself to shave. “I was concussed. Give me a break.” 

“Good luck telling that to Sam.” 

Dean imagines he was waiting with bated breath for the opportunity to say that. “He called you?”

“He did. Said he’s been writing and calling for weeks and that you’ve been avoiding him. He wanted to check and see if I knew where you and your old man were, wanted to know if you were safe.”

Dean stretches out across the bed, his entire body aching and strung tight. “And I’m betting you told him that Dad and I haven’t been hunting together since he left for school.”

“Bingo.”

“How’d that go down?” It’s not really a question, because Dean still knows this part of Sam like an east coast road map and he will be two parts rage with a dash of self-righteous vindication. 

“You oughta call him.” 

“I will,” he says. 

“Sorry for the trouble, son. You know I didn’t realize - ” 

“Don’t apologize,” Dean says. “Not for my mess.”

—

Dean never really figured out where Sam got it from, in a family of shoot-first ask-later, but he always knows just what to say. He has his words honed down to surgically precise little weapons that chip away at every insecurity. He used to call it playing dirty. Sam always said he was just playing smart. 

Sam answers the phone with a soft, “What is it?”

“Figured maybe you wanted to talk about some things,” he says, clearing his throat.

“Not really, no.”

“Look, Sammy - ”

“Do you know anything about torts law?” Sam asks, interrupting him.

“Uh, no?”

“Yeah, well, neither do I. And I have a pretty vicious professor running my seminar tomorrow and exactly six hours to try and cover all of my negligence case work so I really don’t have the time right now.” 

“Oh,” Dean whispers into the receiver. “It would only take - ”

“I barely have time to eat, Dean,” Sam says, interrupting him. “I certainly don’t have time for whatever the fuck this is.”

“Yeah, alright. Good luck tomorrow.”

“I don’t need luck,” Sam tells him. Dean would agree, say he never really did, not even as a child, but the dial-tone is already singing in his ear. 

—

“He’s young, Dean. He’s quick to burn. But Sam will come round.” 

Dean wants to say that he’s not sure either of them have ever been young, but his tongue is trained silent so instead he says, “Yeah, don’t I know it.”

Bobby clears his throat, his usual sign that they’ve reached his threshold for conversation. “Well you know where I’m at if you need me.”

“Yeah, thanks Bobby.”

“Any time.”

Bobby got close to the mark, but still fell wide. Sam burns like paraffin, but he doesn’t give up easily. He holds grudges like he used to hold June bugs, cupped between his hands, forever blowing life into their little wings. John used to say he’d outlive the devil vying for the last word, so Dean always knew to surrender before there could ever be a standoff. 

They fought more often the taller Sam grew. At thirteen years old he pressed his hands to Dean’s shoulders and shoved hard, calling him a little toy soldier with more bitterness than he really should’ve been able to manage at that age. They had been renting at the time, a shit condo outside Halifax, and Sam locked himself in his room while they packed and refused to come out.

Dean threw his duffle into the back of the Impala while John drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, but one last look at the dim light through their bedroom window made him duck down and murmur a quick, “I forgot my second mag.” 

“Yeah, alright,” John said, though he didn’t sound like he believed him. “Make it quick.” 

Dean couldn’t leave him hurt and bitter, because he knew just how important last words could be. He jogged up the stairs and slid a pin into the shoddy lock on their bedroom door. He didn’t wait long enough for Sam to say anything at all before he slid into bed beside him. 

He ran his fingers through his hair whispering, “I’m so sorry, Sammy.” Sam looked away, tears sliding down his temple, but he reached for Dean’s hand and held tight. 

“Don’t go,” his voice cracked and Dean pulled him up and into his arms and thought that he was going to be too big for it soon. He would grow like a Kansas weed. Maybe he’d even outgrow Dean.

“I gotta go, kiddo. But I love you, and I’ll be back soon.”

Sam still didn’t look at him, just let out a shuddering breath against the skin of his neck. “You might not.” 

“I might not,” he agreed, after a moment. “But you know I love you.”

Sam never said it back, but Dean never really needed him to. It wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last, because they both knew he would inevitably follow John out the door with a magnum tucked in the waistband of his jeans. All he could really do was make sure his last words to his little brother were ones that he wouldn’t regret.

Sam’s phone goes to voicemail. 

“I’m sorry, kiddo,” he says into the receiver. “But you know I love you.” 

—

Sometimes he thinks about Lily. He wonders if she ever made it to California, if she found what she was looking for. In the cold blue light of dawn, when he’s half awake and exhausted still, Dean will imagine a world where Sam and Lily live in neighboring apartments. She’ll have window box flowers and Sam will have a parking space across the block. They’ll say good morning and trade cups of sugar and share bottles of wine on lazy Saturday evenings. Sam will work nine to five while Lily pulls odd hours in a trendy San Francisco hair salon. She’ll offer him a trim, he’ll always politely decline. 

They’ll be friends, they’ll confide in each other, and one night Lily will mention a boy she once knew for all of a week in a truck stop Iowa town. She’ll say he had green eyes and freckled shoulders and he smelt of lighter fluid and ash. Sam will assure her that she was right to let him go, that men like that never stick around for long and if they do they’re not worth the trouble. 

In the early hours of the morning, in the seconds it takes for Dean to fall back asleep, Lily and Sam live in perfect sunshine.

—

Dean’s hunt ends just short of bloody and it sets his heart racing to a tune he can’t place. The beer he puts back by the bottle once he’s showered and dressed down in his motel room don’t quite do it, neither does the objectively bad porn on pay-per-view so instead he grabs his keys and his wallet and heads for the boardwalk.

He pulls a man with Miami tanned skin and makeup rimmed eyes in all of ten minutes. He tries to introduce himself, but Dean insists he’s really not that interested in his name.

“Fair enough,” he says in accented English. He really is very pretty, though nothing like Sam. “My place or yours?”

“Yours.”

His apartment isn’t far, something small and rented under the table from a kind landlady who caters to students. Dean isn’t sure how old he is, but he’s certainly young. He carries himself with all of the confidence of a boy sneaking into clubs with a newly acquired fake ID.

“Do I get to know your name?” He asks.

“Sam,” Dean says. 

“Sammy.” He bares beautiful white teeth.

“No. Just Sam.”

Dean knows exactly how to look at women, how to appear interested or nervous or just a tad devil-may-care. Tonight he doesn’t bother to look like anything at all. He pushes him back onto the bed and asks, “You okay with this?”

His eyes flick up towards Dean’s fingers while he undoes the buttons of his shirt. “Yeah,” he breathes, wetting his lips. “More than okay, Sam.” 

He feels a lurch of something vicious when hears his brother’s name spilling from the kid’s soft, open mouth. “Take your clothes off,” he says. “Now.” 

He’s quick to obey and Dean hums in approval as he kneels above him on the bed. “Condoms?” 

“Second drawer.” 

He allows Dean to flip him onto his back and sighs into the pillow when he presses a hand against his shoulder blade, holding him down. He squirms against the sheets as Dean thrusts a single finger inside him, slicked with lube but quick enough to burn.

“In a rush?” He pants into the pillow case.

“Stop talking.” He adds a second finger and the kid moans, thrusting his hips back like a porn star. 

“Whatever you want,” he whispers, pushing up onto one hand and fucking himself on Dean’s fingers. 

Dean knows what he wants. He wants Sam’s voice, California accent and all. He wants his tanned skin and his hair grown out like it was when they were young. He wants to run the pads of his fingers along his ankles, he wants to inspect every new mole and beauty mark. Dean wants to worship his little brother like a golden idol, but he keeps these thoughts locked away, only to be revisited during adrenaline spikes and drunken midnight hook-ups with unsuitable partners. 

He tears into a foil wrapper with his teeth, just like his high school sex ed teacher always told him not to, and rolls the condom over his cock. The boy below him whimpers at the sound and Dean takes that as sign enough.

It’s been a while since he’s fucked a man and Dean remembers all at once exactly what he’s been missing. He’s tight, just on the right edge of too much, and his lower back is curved into an arch as he braces himself on his palms. Dean pauses for a moment, running his fingers along the length of his spine. Then he starts moving in earnest. He tenses and flexes beneath him and it feels more like a hunt than it ought to. He’s strong, despite the whine in his voice as Dean angles into his prostate, and it brings out something wild in him. 

The boy’s shoulders roll back as he drops his elbows, unable to hold himself up any longer. His back is a show of smooth skin and it’s too easy to watch him with half lidded eyes and begin to imagine that’s it’s someone else. So Dean pulls out, making the kid gasp for breath, and hauls him onto his back until he’s staring up at him with wide eyes.

Dean leans forward and runs his finger down the bridge of his nose before parting his legs with a push of his knee and sliding right back in. 

“Jesus, fuck.” He gasps, his eyes closed. Dean watches him, takes in every detail before slowly beginning to move. It’s nearly gentle in comparison and after just a few minutes of lazy grinding the boy under him is begging for more. Dean stays steady and it’s almost like love making until he moves one hand up to rest along his throat. 

Instantly his eyes open, his back arching slightly into Dean’s touch. Men are just so fucking easy. He lets out a breathless moan as Dean tightens his hand ever so slightly against his windpipe. He’s close and based on the desperate movement under him he imagines the kid is as well. 

“Fuck,” he breathes as the flat of Dean’s palm shifts against the edge of his jaw. “Fuck, fuck, Sam.”

Dean lifts his leg slightly higher with his free hand, watching as his eyes flutter shut, before finally tightening his hold around his throat. For a second his hips flutter and thrust, more in pleasure than panic, but the moment passes when Dean fails to let go. His hands fly to Dean’s wrist and he digs his nails into his skin, shaking his head as much as he is able to manage as Dean holds steady. 

Dean begins to move just as his eyes start to bulge. He fucks him harder, throwing his head back as the boy beneath him chokes on his own saliva and struggles for breath. He begins to buck his hips and kick his legs, attempting to dislodge him in any way he can. His fingers reach for Dean’s face, for his eyes, and he falls just short as Dean leans back with a shake of his head. 

“Almost,” he says, though he doubts he can hear him over the rush of blood and panic in his ears. 

Dean comes just seconds after the boy loses consciousness and immediately he pulls his hand away. He runs two fingers along his throat, counting the heavy beats of his pulse as oxygen floods his arteries. He will live, though he’ll no doubt wake with bruises ringed around his neck. He dresses quickly, not bothering to clean off, and shuts the door behind him. It’s evil and twisted and spreading, the things this life does to a man, but for now Dean feels like he’s held down the levees and everything clicks back into place. 

—

He sits at Ellen’s bar in spring damp Nebraska and finds himself perfectly content to pass the time with Jack Daniel’s and a handful of overturned shot glasses. 

“Did you know,” he begins, watching as Ellen stands with crossed arms at his side. “That this shit is brewed in a dry county in Tennessee? Can’t buy a drop of number seven in its own home town.” 

“Stop running your mouth.” Ellen has very little time for most people, and it’s something Dean loves about her. “You gotta find yourself a partner.”

“What do I need a partner for?” Dean may not have Sam’s textbook brain but he sure has something. He’s hunted with men and women before, one-time jobs off of small country roads, and not a single one of them did him any good. There’s less noise with one person, less risk, less time spent arguing about ammunition and exit strategies. 

Ellen leans down, her arms resting on the bar, standing level with him until Dean is forced to look up. “A partner keeps you on the straight and narrow,” she says. “And I see you swerving, boy.”

He knows he shouldn’t laugh at Ellen, not least because she has control over his alcohol consumption and a wicked right hook, but he can’t help the grin of disbelief. He shakes his head, eyes raised to the heavens like a Sunday school dropout. “Worried I’m gonna go on a rampage?”

“No,” she says. “I know you better than that.” She really doesn’t. “But you’re not special, Dean. This life gets to everyone, and it’s getting to you.” When Dean doesn’t answer she stands up straight, not a curve in her iron spine, and says, “I still remember when you were just a sweet little boy.”

“You used to call me a monster.” He points out with a gentle tip of his glass.

“Yeah,” she says. “You sure knew how to raise hell. But you had that angel on your shoulder most of the time and I’m starting to wonder where it’s gone.”

He wants to say California, but by the time he swallows his Dutch courage the back door is swinging shut.


	3. Chapter 3

John Winchester dies with his throat ripped out, quick but painful - an anticlimactic fuck up to end a force of nature. Bobby lies and says it was a wolf attack, a hunt gone wrong, but Dean knows better than that. He let this happen, after all. He knew all along that their father would die bloody, but in the end he always thought that he and Sam would salt John’s funeral pyre and lay it all down to rest. What he didn’t expect was for two hunters from the small town suburbs of Mobile to rob him of the right to watch his father’s body burn to ash. 

But that’s all that is left of him once Bobby finally calls, his voice pitched low and worried. “Did you call me first?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Soon as I heard.”

“Don’t tell Sam.” That job, at least, is Dean’s to keep.

“I’m sorry,” Bobby tells him.

“Me too. You were friends.” As close to a friend as John could have, anyway. 

“Yeah,” Bobby agrees. “We were.” 

—

Dean gets black out drunk on a deadly combination of tequila and Jack and wakes in the back of the Impala with a rolling stomach and ringing in his ears. He chases off the hangover with a swig from his mostly empty bottle and crawls into the front seat, fumbling for the map tucked in the glovebox. 

It’s a thirteen hour drive to Palo Alto and Dean makes it as far as Sacramento before blue and red lights flash in his rear-view mirror. He is still three fingers from sober on an empty stomach, without a full night’s sleep in days, so Dean isn’t really all that surprised when he’s shoved into the back of a police cruiser with the radio spitting static. The cop doesn’t bother to cuff him and Dean demands his car be towed into the city proper if he’s going to have to spend the night in lock up.

“Your dime,” he says.

“No worries, I’ll pay for it on a card.” 

It’s not his first time doing twenty-four for twenty points over the limit, awaiting a trial date and a magistrate’s order. But when they lead him into a well-lit city precinct, Dean thinks that an overnight stay might be looking slightly too optimistic. Sacramento is nothing like the small town ink blot sheriff’s departments of the Midwest. It’s all brand new and teched out and when they press his fingers to glass scanners, he remembers why exactly they were raised to avoid cities.

A computer screen shows Dean’s entire life plotted on a map, two decades of sloppy crime scenes and partially lifted prints. “Well,” he says, smiling up at the officer who brought him in. “Who would’ve thought?”

When his head makes contact with the concrete wall and cuffs slice half circles into his wrists, Dean thinks he probably had it coming. 

—

“I can’t fucking believe you.” The door slams behind him, heavy and solid and built to trap and suddenly Sam is in front of him, no longer twenty and deceptively bright. He wears a suit that fits him too well and his hair is shorter than he’d ever allowed Dean to cut it when they were kids, trimmed at his nape and tamed with gel. Sam’s hands are flat on the table and Dean’s are cuffed in front of him.

He slams a folder down, his eyes dark and his jaw tense as he says, “You know what these are, Dean? They’re BOLO’s for five separate aliases. They have photographs, fingerprints, and this is just what I could get today. Do you know how many charges they have against you?”

Dean smiles up at him because Sam looks likely to throw a punch either way. 

“No clue?” Sam asks through gritted teeth. “Me neither. Because they haven’t finished counting.” 

“Sounds like I need a good lawyer.”

Dean remembers helping Sam with his algebra homework on the wooden steps of a second story guest house in Livingston fucking Montana, and now his scruffy little boy wears a tailored suit with a forged California Bar ID pinned to his lapel. 

“You’d need a fucking miracle,” he snaps. 

“That’s why I called you.” 

“I’m still in school, Dean.” He snarls his name like a wounded animal. “Did you even stop to think how this would look? Their own little star of America’s Most Wanted makes his call to a number he seems to know by heart, a number that can easily be traced to class registries and emergency contact forms at Stanford. What conclusions do you think they’re going to draw from that?” He asks. “I know you have a low opinion of cops, Dean, but I guarantee you even the feds can connect those dots. And now, when we break you out, mine’ll be the very first name on their shit list.” 

“Break me out?”

Sam whirls around to face him. “The death penalty may be in limbo in California but I’m willing to bet they’d make an exception for you, assuming you’re not extradited first.” 

“Just for little old me?” He asks with a smile because he wants nothing more than to see the his brother’s carefully laid middle class mask crack to show a bit of the street underneath. 

“Fuck you,” he says, but this time he sounds tired, like his little city flame has just burnt out. Dean can sympathize. Sometimes he thinks he’s been burnt out since he was a teenager, running on fumes. Sam collapses into the chair across from him, head tilted back towards the speckled ceiling. 

“Figured you were gonna storm out on me,”

Sam’s eyes are closed. “Procedure,” he says. “It would take me the better part of an hour to walk you through it if I were actually your lawyer.”

“You are actually my lawyer.”

“First of all, I’m not anyone’s lawyer.” Sam says, sitting up to face him. “And second, even if I was, the law’s not exactly going to help either of us right now.”

“So you have a plan?”

“Fuck you, of course I have a plan.” 

“Is it any good?” Dean asks.

“Guess we’ll know if you end up in a gas chamber, won’t we?”

“Seriously? A gas chamber?”

Sam shrugs, looking away. “Technically, you’re allowed to choose.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.” Sam’s eyes are closed again and Dean wonders how other people must see him. He probably looks young and successful and west coast gorgeous like a beach boy raised right. 

“Dad’s dead,” Dean says, finally. It doesn’t burn his tongue like he thought it might, it doesn’t break his teeth to say.

Sam doesn’t open his eyes. “Yeah. I thought he might be.” 

“Do you want to - ”

“No,” Sam says, his voice tight. “I don’t want to hear about it just yet.” Dean allows him his silence and they don’t speak again until the clock hits three fifteen and Sam stands to leave with a murmured, “They’re transferring you to high security as soon as the judge signs off. You’ll hear from me before then.”

“Hey.” Sam pauses with a hand on the frame. “Anyone ever pick the gas chamber anymore?”

Sam watches him with hooded, tired eyes and lets the door slip shut for long enough to say, “Do you know why I was angry?”

He wants to ask which time, but Dean knows better. “Because I lied.”

“No,” he says. “Because this whole time I thought you stayed for him.”

He really does leave, after that, and Dean is alone with the screaming fluorescents and the stale taste of liquor in his mouth. 

—

It’s half past two in the morning when a guard opens his cell dressed in uniform with his cap pulled down over his eyes. He uncuffs Dean’s ankles, seemingly unaware of the incriminating angles of the security cameras, and waves for him to follow. Neither of them speak as he leads him through dimmed hallways to an interrogation room at the end of the hall. 

The guard leaves him in the sickly yellow lighting and shuts the door without a word. Dean counts the footsteps that echo down the hall, watching the camera above the door and its stuttering little red light until suddenly it stops. The precinct hardly seems to move at all as he reaches towards the door and slowly twists the handle. It’s unlocked and Dean smiles, whispering his brother’s name. 

The fire exit at the end of the hall is propped open and he wonders just how Sam managed this little escape plan. He can hear sirens out front, the usual bustle of a city street. 

He barely has a foot on the gravel when an alarm sounds. The door opens to a black Chrysler parked just across the street and Dean starts at it running.

“Take another step and I shoot.” Dean has his cuffed hands angled behind his head, his teeth gritted as he stumbles to a halt. He looks up just in time to see Sam step out of the car and reach for his waistband, still reflex ready. 

“Get back in the car.” The officer is shouting. It’s the same man who brought him in, red faced and righteous. Dean is shaking his head, watching his brother with wide eyes. Sam ignores them both. He takes a step back with a semi-automatic held at the perfect angle. He still has such a beautiful eye for firearms, aim to an art form. 

“No,” Dean breathes, just as his civilian boy pulls the trigger and he doesn’t miss. 

The officer is dead before he hits the ground, but there’s another at the door, shooting at them both with academy poor aim. Dean lunges for the car, a dented rental with bullet holes to add to the chipping paint, just as a shot grazes his shoulder. He barely feels it through the usual thrum of adrenaline, but he hears Sam shout as he takes aim through the cracked window. 

“Hurry up and shut the fucking door.”

“Will you stop yelling?” He asks as Sam steps on the gas to the soundtrack of a dozen police sirens and swerves out of the parking lot. 

They ditch the Chrysler on a residential street a half mile over, trading it in for a hot-wired BMW with a parking permit while Dean unlocks his cuffs with Sam’s old rake picks. 

“They won’t miss it until morning,” Sam says, the engine running nearly silent. “This is a good neighborhood.” 

Normally he’d bitch about Sam being behind the wheel, about the way he drives with just a bit of city impatience and doesn’t appear to have much use for signalling but God, it feels so minor compared to the steadily creeping realization that he may have just ruined his brother’s life. The one good thing he’s ever done, the boy he all but raised and let go just like John fucking told him to, and now there’s nothing left of Sam’s perfect life but an empty apartment in Palo Alto and a California arrest warrant. Worse than the five years gone to waste is the bullet lodged firmly in the back of a cop’s skull.

“You alright?” He asks. Dean is pretty certain that he had the soul trained out of him, but Sam is supposed to be a civilian now.

“You’re the one who got shot.”

“Barely,” Dean says, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. 

“I’ll fix it up when we’re far enough to make a stop.”

Sam doesn’t seem inclined to say much else, but Dean isn’t about to give up. “I shouldn’t have - I didn’t mean for any of that to happen. And look, I know it’s a bit like dying, killing someone for the first time, but it wasn’t your fault, it was - ”

“Dean,” he says, his voice even and calm. “He had a gun pointed at you.”

“Yeah, but - ”

“I’m fine,” he says, and he sounds it. There isn’t a trace of hurt or anger or bitter grief on his face as the headlights pass over him in an arch of light. “Trust me, I’m fine.”

Sam patches him up in a gas station bathroom with a few travel first aid kits and some shit whisky from behind the counter. “Could’ve gotten peroxide,” Sam mumbles as he runs a pink plastic cigarette lighter over the end of a sewing needle.

“Then I couldn’t drink it after,” Dean points out. “You’ve been out of the game too long, little brother.” 

Sam looks up at him with blood drying on his finger tips and sweat slicked hair and he laughs. 

—

They drive until they reach the outskirts of Idaho, to a border town near Silver City with nothing but overnight inns and gas stations. Sam checks them in and pays with cash, leaving Dean in the car after a reminder to, “Get two queens, we’re not paying extra for your fucking growth spurt.” 

Their room smells like cheap floral cleaner and Sam prods at his bandaged arm in the seconds it takes for Dean to undress. Once Sam pats his shoulder, satisfied that his work will hold, Dean all but crawls into bed, half asleep with an ancient down pillow tucked beneath his head. 

“Tell me how he died.” Sam is a silhouette against the peeling wall, sitting on the opposite bed with his feet flat on the floor, motionless. 

“A wolf,” he says, almost hating himself for how easy it is. 

Sam hums to himself and Dean may have lost years of his brother’s life but he knows that sound. “Come on,” he says, his voice rough from exhaustion, sleep stinging his eyes. “Don’t go all Tupac lives on me over there. The man’s dead.”

“I know that,” Sam says. 

“Bobby got it straight from Dad’s mouth, kiddo. He was on a wolf hunt. A pack in Alabama.” 

Sam is silent for a while and Dean is half way to sleep, drifting into his pillow, when he finally speaks. “Bobby always was a very good story teller,” he says, his voice soft. 

Dean doesn’t want to talk about this, he doesn’t want to come up with any more lies to try and force feed his brother, so instead he asks, “How’d you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Get me out.”

Sam stretches back against the bedspread, his knees still tucked over the edge. “Paid off a cop and two guards with counterfeits. California has been cutting budgets left and right since Schwarzenegger got in.” Dean snorts and Sam ignores him. “They hire third party security for the night shifts. Big guys with authority problems and not enough brain cells to pass the POST exam. I may have slipped in one of Dad’s old FBI badges and heavily implied that you were a DCS agent.” 

Dean laughs this time and thinks that Bobby isn’t the only one with a silver tongue for storytelling. He doesn’t believe a word of it. “Some monopoly money and the promise of conspiracy. That easy, huh?”

“Well,” Sam begins, shifting beneath the polyester sheets. “You did get shot.”

“Barely though,” he reminds him with a smile lost to the darkened room. 

“Yeah, barely.”

—

Sam buys gaudy sunglasses and a baseball cap at a Cracker Barrel along with their waffles to go. “They’ll have your mug shot plastered across every screen this side of the Appalachians,” he says, sliding into the passenger seat of another lifted car. 

“So what’s the plan?” Dean asks, wishing he had the Impala roaring at his fingertips instead of this beat up Japanese excuse for an automobile. 

“We get to the other side of the Appalachians.” 

Dean wears his sunglasses with barely concealed disgust and sets his cap low over his eyes, but when they’re finally recognized in a single-service gas station in Nebraska, it’s not Dean they’re looking at. Instead the man at the register, balding and Midwest overweight, is watching Sam while his fingers edge towards a plastic flip phone. Dean is at his side, gun aimed at his temple before he can even dial a nine. 

“One fucking move and your body hits the floor.” And God, he hopes he does, his hands almost shake with it. 

Sam looks up from the label of an energy drink, eyes wide. He doesn’t say a word, just looks at his brother’s finger on the trigger, lingering on the barrel pressed to the man’s skin. Dean jerks his head towards the door. Sam’s eyes meet his for all of a breath before he turns to leave. 

“Hand me the phone.” His hands shake and fumble and Dean smiles when their fingertips touch. “Good man,” he says, breaking it in half and scattering the pieces along the tile. 

They ditch the car two towns over for another fucking Toyota. Dean wants to say something, to explain, but Sam’s bitten lips and motionless fingers keep his tongue trapped between his teeth. 

They don’t speak again until they reach Kansas City and the morning sun is high above their heads. Dean’s stomach rolls with a combination of hunger and nausea when Sam steps out of the car to get a room, a beanie pulled low over his ears. 

“I’m going to shower,” he says, toeing off his shoes and closing the door behind him. 

Dean tries not to linger on the flat tone of his brother’s voice and instead he savors the feeling of a pillow beneath his head. He relaxes into the scratchy sheets and the firm mattress and drifts into a hunter’s sleep.

He wakes again to the soft hum of the bathroom fan and Sam crawling into bed beside him. He’s wearing nothing but boxers, his hair dripping cold onto the comforter. 

“Would you have done it?” He whispers, laying his head on the pillow beside him. “Would have you shot him?” His brother was a beautiful child, round faced and quick to smile. But now he looks like he’s been cut from stone, with shadows at his cheekbones and lamplight in his eyes. 

“Yeah,” he says, because he’s sick of lying and if there’s something rotten in him, Sam is going to find it on his own soon enough. 

“No, Dean.” Sam whispers, like he can hear his every thought spoken aloud. The damp, cold skin of his fingertip traces the knot of Dean’s jaw, falling to rest at his pulse. “That’s not it at all.”

“Sammy,” he begins, his voice rough from sleep and dread. “You don’t - ”

“You’re my brother,” Sam says, cutting him off. His hair is strung across his cheek, his eyelashes clumped together. “You would’ve put a bullet in that man’s head, Dean, and I would’ve watched you do it.”

“I wouldn’t’ve let you,” he admits.

Sam’s fingers stay to trace the edge of his cheekbone as he whispers a breathless, “And if I’d wanted to?” 

Dean stills, watching him, every shadowed inch of skin. He thought there might be something hiding beneath that California tan, but he never dared to hope. “You wanted me to stop hunting,” is what he says instead. 

Sam looks at him with an indulgent sort of smile. He leans forward and just as Dean’s eyes flutter shut, Sam kisses him. It’s barely a brush of their lips, no more than the innocent pecks he would give at the age of six before affection became inappropriate, something to hide from their father. 

“Because you were eventually going to die. God, it was so inevitable. And I used to think,” he exhales a shuttering breath, his hand cupping Dean’s cheek. “I used to tell myself that if Dad ever came home without you, I’d kill him.”

Dean looks his beautiful little boy in the eye and feels certain that he would have. “You didn’t have to,” is all the thinks to say.

Sam presses their lips together, another chaste pause. “No,” he murmurs, his eyes closed. “I didn’t.”

—

They have to lay low for as long as it takes the feds to demote them from ‘at large’ to ‘likely fled abroad,’ and Dean makes his suggestion over a breakfast of fried eggs with extra bacon eaten sloppy on the road. “I’ll have Bobby send a hunter for the Impala as soon as police compound puts it up for bid, but until then, I say we head for Nitro.”

Sam smiles around the lid of his coffee cup. “You always did have a thing for West Virginia.” 

Not West Virginia, Dean thinks, but the memory of Sam, young and curious and his alone. He was never more thankful for John’s absence than when Sam was laid out in the grass, their fingers entwined, guiding Dean’s hand to trace the constellations above their heads. 

“You used to laugh in your sleep,” he says suddenly. “At that age. You’d wake me up, giggling away.” His brother spent each night suntanned and drowsy with his head pillowed on Dean’s shoulder.

“I’ll never be ten years old again,” Sam says, chewing slowly. 

Dean has spent nearly six years dreaming of his brother, of every possible permutation. “I don’t want you to be.”

Sam smiles like he might just believe it. 

—

John used to bitch about the thirty mile stretches between exits, the summer fog and steep hills, but this span of interstate sixty-four might very well be his favorite road in the whole damn country. The sun rises ahead of them, painting the West Virginia mountains a shade of morning gold. Sam’s eyes remain stubbornly closed as he reaches up to swat at the sun visor, before sinking deeper into his seat. 

“Alleghenies?” He asks, his voice rough with sleep. Dean remembers pouring over old topographical maps as Sam worked to memorize every mountain range in the whole of the continental United States. He wonders, briefly, how many of them he still remembers. 

“Not just yet.” he says. Sam’s arms are crossed, his chin is tucked into his chest as he fights to stay asleep. “We’re stopping in Institute for supplies before heading back around, you might as well wake up now.”

“How far?” He mumbles into his collar. 

“Three exits, so get ready. We need some clothes and food and whatever else you want to keep you from going stir crazy. Bobby said the place was stocked, but I’m guessing he meant in the weapons department and not necessarily for games night.” 

Sam snorts, his eyes still closed. “You wanna reopen our childhood Monopoly feuds?”

“That wasn’t a feud.” The sun is in his eyes and Dean doesn’t look away. “That was me winning and you being bitter about it.” 

“You lifted money from the bank,” Sam says, sitting up and stretching. 

“Money laundering,” Dean says with a wave of his hand.

“Grand larceny, more like.”

“I was making the game realistic.” 

Sam shakes his head in disbelief and Dean taps his fingers against the steering wheel, humming _Country Roads_ like an old church hymn. 

—

Termites flutter down from the ceiling lights like confetti and the floors creek with a note of motel familiarity. It’s damn near perfect, to Dean’s eyes, every rotting inch of this old wooden house. Sam sprawls out across the threadbare couch with little concern for the stains dotting the upholstery, dressed down in black boxer-briefs to combat the humidity. 

“Look at these books,” he says, picking from the pile stacked beside the armrest. They’re old and rice paper thin from years of wear, but Sam holds up a paperback copy of _Catch-22_ like it’s something sacred. “I haven’t had time to read fiction in years.” His smile seems so different from the bland Stanford grin he saw at graduation, though Dean wonders if it’s just wishful thinking. 

“Now you have all the time in the world,” Dean tells him, watching from the doorway. 

Sam tips his head back and holds his gaze. “You were supposed to call Bobby,” he reminds him. Dean wants nothing more than to watch his brother through the dim, dust filtered light until the sun goes down. 

“Yeah,” he says, finally. “I didn’t forget.” He digs through his duffle for one of the burner phones they picked up in Institute and waits for the screen to flicker to life. 

His fingers pause over the rubber number pad as Sam speaks, his voice soft, book still held open above him. “I love you,” he says. 

Sam, for all his childhood habits of sticky fingers and wandering hands, was always far too stubborn to say anything that could be mistaken for affection. Dean clenches his jaw to prevent his heart from spilling out between his teeth.

“You left me that message,” he continues. “You got to say it last. You always got to say it last.”

“Yeah,” he says, clearing his throat. “Wasn’t really your style.”

“Well good news,” Sam says, turning a page. “I’ve grown up.”

The screen on Dean’s phone has faded to black. “Yeah,” he admits. “You have.” 

“Go call Bobby.” 

Dean is fourteen years old again and helplessly in love. So he does the only thing he can do right now, with Sam lying half naked on an old knitted throw, he turns and pushes his way through the screen door and allows Bobby’s gruff answer of, “Where the fuck are you boys?” to pull him back above water. 

“Just settling in,” he says, looking out over the fields of dry grass. West Virginia has passed by spring with next to no rain and Dean imagines that if he lights a match the whole state could go up in flames. 

“How’s Sam doing?”

“He’s fine,” Dean says. “We’re doing alright. It’s just - ” He sits with his back against the crumbling remains of the rock wall fence that lines the property. “Sam doesn’t believe it.”

“Believe what?”

“That Dad was killed by a wolf.” A daddy longlegs spider traipses over the edge of his jeans. He watches its progress as he waits for Bobby to finally speak.

“And why’s that?”

“‘Cause he knows him.” 

Bobby snorts but doesn’t disagree. “And why do you think John wasn’t done by a wolf?”

Dean grimaces and looks back towards the house. Somewhere behind those slashed screen windows, Sam sits reading a book with a faded blue cover, running a hand through his piecey hair and sweating away the heat. 

“Because I know that he’s been after something for the better part of three years. And I know it was a demon.” 

“Who told you?” He asks, finally.

“Worked it out,” he lies.

“Listen, Dean. Your Daddy finished what he started, so there’s nothing left to get into. Everything’s done, it’s over with. Now we all just gotta move on. You hear me?”

“Loud and clear,” he says, as the spider stumbles over the back of his hand. “I’ll forget we ever spoke about it.”

“Good.”

Dean stands, setting the spider back in the uncut grass as it manoeuvres towards the rocks. “You keeping an eye out for my baby?” 

Bobby hums in the affirmative. “You watching out for your brother?”

“You know I am,” he says. “Thinking it’s about lunch time for us, anyway.”

“You go on then,” Bobby says. “But keep in touch, boy.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. The screen door rattles in the breeze. “Talk soon.”

The gas hasn’t been turned on yet and it’s too humid to cook anyway, so Dean scarfs down a grocery-made sub while Sam pours himself a bowl of disturbingly sugar-free looking cereal. They lay out on the porch, listening to the distant sound of cicadas only just beginning to hatch.

Sam is beside him, his back flat against the hardwood with an empty bowl to his right. Dean is sucking a glob of mayo from his finger when Sam runs his hand along the curve of his hip. He twists to face him, his head pillowed on one arm, curling his body around Dean’s crossed legs like an old barn cat. 

There’s a lot that could send Dean Winchester to hell. The list probably starts with gluttony and all-you-can-eat western buffets, traversing wrath and rage and bar fights and steady trigger fingers, ending somewhere here, with his little brother staring up at him in invitation. 

“You’re not so little anymore,” he says to himself as Sam tugs at the hem of his t-shirt. 

“Hate to break it to you, but you’ve been the little one for a long, long time.” Sam fits his fingers around the nape of his neck, pulling him closer so that Dean is in a sprawl above his brother’s chest, balanced on the palms of his hands.

“Oddly,” he murmurs, leaning down and bringing their foreheads together. “That doesn’t bother me as much as I always thought it would.”

“This is okay?” Sam asks, tightening his hold. “This is what you want?” 

It has never once been about what Dean wants. “Yeah, yeah it is.”

Sam doesn’t hesitate. The second the words leave his mouth, he’s pushing himself up and cupping Dean’s face in his hands. Their lips meet, open mouthed and sloppy. Sam’s teeth sink into Dean’s bottom lip and his tongue curls into his mouth, impatient and sweet with the taste of whole milk. Dean kisses him back, running his hands down Sam’s bare chest, pausing to thumb at his nipples, reacquainting himself with the contours of his brother’s body. He has more muscle than he did at seventeen and Dean digs his fingers in hard, making Sam gasp into his mouth. 

“Jesus,” he murmurs against his lips. “Take off your fuckin’ clothes, Dean.” Now that he’s far from his glass towers, Sam sounds a little bit boonies, a little more like him. He pulls away long enough to tug off his jeans, before he’s back on Sam, fighting to run his hands over every inch of him. 

“Cards on the table,” Sam whispers as Dean strips off his shirt while mouthing at his jaw, two day’s worth of stubble scratching at his skin. He makes a dismissive sound deep in his throat because nothing Sam could possibly say would stop him from running his fingers down his brother’s bare thighs. Sam huffs as Dean’s hands linger along the slope of his abdomen. 

“I have visions,” he says, followed by a murmured, “Sometimes.”

Dean pulls away for just a moment. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You having one now, then?” He combs his fingers through Sam’s gloriously untrimmed pubic hair. 

“No.”

“So this conversation can definitely wait until later?”

Sam hesitates, his fingers fluttering over the base of Dean’s throat. “I had one just like this. Once, a few years ago. And I thought – but I guess it wasn’t really a dream, it was - ” he pauses, looking up at Dean with a fevered sheen to his eyes. “Yeah,” he says, finally. “It can wait.”

—

The morning fog hasn’t quite burned off and Sam sits on the grass with his legs folded in front of him, wearing nothing but a new pair of light washed jeans that ride up at his ankles. He’s dipping overripe strawberries into a container of caster sugar, like they used to do when they were kids with a sweet tooth and a very limited grocery list. He licks his fingers clean and Dean is sure he was born for this, to watch Sam stain sugar with strawberry juice and pluck blades of grass from the ground of old West Virginia farmland. 

“Come sit,” he says without turning and Dean never disobeys. 

Sam offers him a strawberry snow-capped in sugar. He hasn’t tasted anything as good, as tart and sweet and fresh, since he was just a child. “When did the visions start?”

“First two years of college,” he says. 

“You get ‘em often?”

“Not anymore,” Sam admits. 

He absentmindedly runs his fingers along his brother’s iron spine, his skin damp with sweat because even in the mornings Nitro holds stubborn to the mountain humidity. “What do you see?”

Sam’s back arches at his touch. “Lots of things. But mostly, I saw people I didn’t know. I saw how they would die. At first, it was always too late to do anything, like it was happening in real time. And later - ” He pauses as Dean traces the shape of each shoulder blade. “Later, I saw more and more of their lives. I dreamed about them every night. I knew whether they preferred skim or two-percent, the names of their pets, how well they got along with their parents.”

“So you knew where they lived?” Dean asks, slotting together the pieces of Sam’s careful admission.

“Yeah.”

“You knew when they were gonna die?”

“Down to the second,” Sam says, running his sticky fingers through the sugar and licking them clean. He’s avoiding Dean’s gaze, like he isn’t everything he’s ever wished for. 

“And you’ve never tried to stop it happening?” 

“I never wanted to.” It’s not really the confession it should be.

“You liked it? Watching?” 

Sam’s eyes are hazel and gold rimmed. “Can you live with that?”

Dean wraps an arm around Sam’s shoulders, smiling into his hair, and tells him he can live with that just fine. 

—

It’s too hot to have the oven running and Dean nearly takes his hand off attempting to light the pilot light with his zippo, but all in all it’s worth it for the look on Sam’s face when he sees the ingredients spread out across the formica countertops and asks, “What are you baking?”

“Cornbread,” Dean says. “Though no promises.”

Sam hops onto the counter, ankles crossed, and watches him work like he used to when he was just a child. The butter nearly melts itself in the stuffy air of the kitchen and when he catches Sam eyeing the container for a moment too long Dean says, “Don’t let it break your little California heart. Most important ingredient in cornbread is the butter.” 

“Thought it was the corn.” 

“Shut up, Sammy.” He doesn’t have cast iron so he makes do with an old tin baking pan with butter scrubbed into the edges. Sam watches the entire time, following every movement from his countertop perch. 

The second he has the pan in the oven, Sam is stepping onto the linoleum floor, watching him expectantly. 

“It only takes twenty minutes to bake. Less with this fucking excuse for an oven,” Dean says. 

“I can get you off in twenty minutes.” Dean is learning every breathy pitch to Sam’s voice and it feels like such a natural progression to place his hands on Sam’s shoulders as he sinks to the floor, unbuckling his belt with practiced ease. He doesn’t feel guilty when he tugs at his zipper. He doesn’t picture Sam at six year’s old smiling at him around a plastic spoon of crunchy peanut butter. 

Sam uses his mouth like he’s practiced before and Dean lets his head hang back, his arms braced against the countertop. 

“God,” he murmurs, bringing one hand to the back of his brother’s head. “Who were you fucking back in school?”

Sam’s eyes flutter up, watching as he swallows his cock as far as it will possibly go. Dean can feel the fight fit of his throat, he can practically see it behind the fluttering panic of his Adam’s apple. Tears shine at the corners of his eyes as his nose rubs against Dean’s pubic bone, and all it takes is a tiny thrust of Dean’s hips to make one fall in a perfect trail down his brother’s cheek. He sets a hand back on Sam’s shoulder and pulls away for long enough to allow him to breathe. 

“I don’t need it,” Sam tells him, his voice scratchy and raw.

He thinks of that summer tan boy from Florida who chanted Sam’s name like a benediction and he fucks his brother’s throat until the egg timer spins and screeches. His corn bread comes out with burnt edges, but Sam is happy to just scrape away the black with the dull edge of a butter knife. They’re finished with it by suppertime.

—

Dean gives himself three weeks of summer weather, unbearable heat, and afternoon thunderstorms that shake the windowpanes with their force. He gives himself mornings spent licking into his brother’s mouth, kissing him awake while the fan blows in a lazy half circle. He gives himself days spent lying in the grass, nights where Sam follows him through the living room with a toad held in his cupped hands, cold beer and ice cubes stolen from between his lips. Dean allows himself paradise for four short weeks and thinks that his life has been worth it for this summer alone. 

They are lying at opposite ends of the couch, books in hand and legs entwined, Sam’s foot rubbing suggestively against his inner thigh. “You were right,” he says.

Sam glances up at him through the hair in his eyes, slowly growing long and wild. “About what?”

“Dad wasn’t killed by a wolf.”

Sam nods, folding over the corner of a page and tossing his book closed onto the coffee table. “I know. And I have a theory as to what really got him,” he watches him closely, a smile at his lips. “But I think you worked that out long before I did.”

“Rumor was he’d been messing with demons, Bobby says he finished the job.” 

“When did that rumor start?” Sam’s foot is still moving, a hypnotic drag against his skin.

“About a year or two after you left for school.” 

Sam nods his head and settles back into the couch, but Dean knows that look. “If you wanna do some digging, you’re gonna have to hit up the library in town because I don’t know if it’s even possible to get Wifi out here.”

“We’re in West Virginia, Dean. Not the Western Sahara. Anyway, I’ll think about it. The cops are after us. As far as I’m concerned, we have all the time in the world.”

It’s not three days later that Sam finally caves and drives out to the library, his feet bare, tennis shoes hanging from his crooked fingers as he climbs into the beat up old truck that came with the farm. Dean wants desperately to have the Impala back so he can see Sam sliding into the driver’s seat for his weekly trip into town. 

As he watches the truck disappear along the sloping roads, Dean cracks open a beer and thinks of what their lives could’ve been, raised on this land. It’s a story of smudged details, because he knows that the foothills of these mountains are hosts to poverty and failing family businesses and power plant pollution, but when the light hits Sam’s hair just right and he shines with it Dean can ignore all that. 

He knows his brother is digging for something that should lay buried, but he doesn’t warn him against it. Instead he lets him research, coming home each Thursday afternoon with a stack of books and hand written notes that he pours over with an old Greek lexicon. 

Dean feels like he’s lying by omission, but then again, he more or less always has been.

—

Sam spends an entire morning on the porch steps with a tome on ritualization open in his lap. Dean gave up his early attempts to bargain for his brother’s attention, but as noon rolls in along with the humidity of an oncoming storm, Dean resumes his efforts. He wanders carefully through the walnut trees that line the road, running his fingers along low hanging branches until he finds what he’s looking for. He plucks a June bug from the bark, black and auburn and just the right size. 

He fiddles with the end of a cord of fishing wire, tying careful knots around its middle just below the notches of its wings. It is instantly familiar, the scratch of its little studded legs against the pads of his fingertips. 

“Sam,” he says, walking to his side, crouching down in front of him. “Look.”

He gently tosses the beetle into the air, watching as it takes flight, buzzing in lazy circles above their heads. He holds out the end of the wire for his brother to take, but it’s a moment before Sam even notices. He’s busy watching it fly with something akin to awe. 

“Dean,” he whispers, fingers closing around his as they keep the string steady. 

Sam reaches up, holding out his hand for the beetle to land on. He inspects the glossy shine of its wings, biting his lip as it settles along his palm. They watch it for a moment, like it’s something more than an ordinary June bug, like it’s something achingly rare. There’s a distant rumble of thunder, echoing through the mountains, but it’s still miles away from their little stretch of summer. Sam cups his hands, blows into his palms, and they watch it fly. 

Sam’s eyes are glassy and he closes them for just a moment, breathing out through his mouth like he’s struggling with it. He lets go of the wire and the beetle stumbles and sticks to the rotten wood siding as Sam’s attention shifts and he pushes Dean back, slowly guiding him to the ground. The grass is straw thick and itchy through the thin material of his t-shirt and Sam is balanced on his hips, his knees slotted over his thighs as he traces the length of Dean’s sternum. Thunder rolls in the distance as Sam settles against him.

“I want to summon a demon,” he says, finally. “I have questions.”

“About Dad?” 

Sam pauses, his fingernails biting into his skin for a second or more before he splays his hands flat against Dean’s chest. “Not really,” he whispers. “Sometimes I had the same dreams again and again, but they weren’t visions. At least, I thought they weren’t.” Sam’s skin is washed out in the overhang of an oncoming storm. His hair curls around the curves of his temple, shadowing his eyes. 

“How would you know?” He asks, running his fingers along the flat expanse of Sam’s abdomen, thinking that he’s just as beautiful now as he is in summer sunlight. 

“Because they never came true.” He leans back down, kissing Dean with teasing strokes of his tongue. When he finally pulls back he keeps their foreheads pressed together, their lips brushing with every word. “In college I used to dream about June bugs. You’d bring me one tied up with fishing wire, just like you did when I was little. But you weren’t fourteen in my dream, you were older and your hair was lighter from the sun, a little too long for Dad’s buzz cuts, and you were wearing blue jeans and sweating through your t-shirt.”

Dean breathes against Sam’s mouth, unsure of what to say.

“And there was a storm coming,” he whispers. “And you would stand in front of me with black clouds along the horizon and you’d say ‘Sam, look.’ And then I’d wake up.” Dean’s fingers are knotted in Sam’s hair. “It always broke my heart to wake up,” he adds, like an afterthought.

“I’d dream of a room,” Sam continues, his eyes fluttering closed. “For just for a few weeks, but I still remember it. It was our room, in this house, with the sheets all over the floor and our clothes falling out of the dresser and I’d dream of looking for something, but then I’d hear you calling my name, like you were far away, somewhere outside.” 

“What do you dream of now?” His voice is thick with apprehension.

“Now I have dreams where you and I were born for more than just this.” Sam runs his hand along his cheek before pulling away. “It’s not as clear, it’s like looking through frosted glass, but there’s something we need to do, Dean. There’s something we’re owed.” He’s seen this look before, when Sam sat on his bed and flipped through college acceptance letters with a barely audible confession. Dean knows what ambition looks like, and it glows bright in Sam’s eyes. 

“Then we’ll summon a demon,” he whispers because Dean’s own ambition never stretched much farther than this, than his fingers against Sam’s hipbones, the sticky summer catch of their skin. He feels the first rain drop, thick and heavy against his cheek.

“When’s Bobby coming down?” Sam asks.

“He leaves next week.” Lightning flashes bright against the backdrop of a distant mountain. “It’s raining, you know.”

Sam kisses him, dirty and wet as he tugs at the hem of Dean’s shirt, lifting it up and over his shoulders. “Then we better hurry.” 

—

Dean finishes tracing a circle of red dripping paint and thinks that he knows exactly what will answer their call. Sam’s Latin sounds like it always did, a bit like a native tongue. He barely glances at the book in his hand, too busy watching the circle intently until the lights flicker and Dean’s breath comes out as a sigh.

It’s blonde again, wearing the vessel of a fifty year-old woman with straight silk hair and a kind, thin lipped smile. It makes her crystal eyes shift to black, but Dean can still make out the light that it must have seen in her. 

“Winchesters,” it says, stalking the edges of the trap like a lion’s den. 

Sam inclines his head, eyes bright. “And you are?”

“Call me Andrew.” 

Dean snorts and it turns to face him, baring the human’s tiny white teeth. “Something funny, Deano?”

“Andrew?”

“Andras, if we’re getting technical. But times are changing, I have a translation now.” 

“Right.”

“Is there a reason you called me here?” It looks at Sam who stands watching them with a hand splayed at his mouth, a smile playing against his fingertips. 

“I have a question.”

“Just one?”

Sam nods his head and it smiles with oil slick lips and tips forward in a mock bow. “Then ask away.”

Sam clears his throat and Dean steps to the side, allowing himself to fall into the background of the demon’s attention, watching his brother’s spine take on an attorney’s ridge. “I want to know how,” is all he says. 

Dean chews absently on the skin at the edge of his thumb, watching its eyes widen with ill-concealed delight.

“Oh,” it breathes. “You’ve worked out the rest, have you?”

“More or less,” Sam admits. “Though it all seems rather moot now, doesn’t it.”

“Oh not necessarily.” It rushes forward, standing toe to toe with the devil’s trap, fingers twitching like it’s desperate to take Sam’s hands in its own. “There’s a vacuum, you know. Unfilled as of the day your father bit the dust.”

Sam leans forward, but remains just out of reach. “I’m sure hell has no shortage of contenders.”

“True.” Its vessel wears a wedding ring of scuffed gold. “But there’s not much diversity among the marquis. We need a bit of - ” it pauses with its tongue tucked up against the roof of its mouth. “New blood.”

“I just want to know how,” Sam says, but Dean knows he’s setting aside every word, noting every suggestive pull of its lips. 

“Demon blood,” it says, with a flick of golden hair. “Dripped into your mouth when you were just a baby.”

Sam hums, leaning back on his heels. “And that would’ve worked for anyone?”

“Oh no,” it says. “Not anyone. You had to have a little something extra, something God given, if you know what I mean.”

Sam smiles. “I think I do.” 

“Sammy,” it sighs. “Just remember I’ve always been rooting for you.”

Sam’s features twist and for a split second he’s unrecognizable to Dean. “Oh, I will. And while we have you here, there’s one last thing I want to know,” Sam’s voice is steady and commanding and so very like their father that Dean could just fall to his knees at his call. 

“Anything for you.”

“John Winchester’s soul,” is all he says.

It falters and bares its teeth in a pained grin. “We don’t have it.” 

Sam considers this for a moment, his head tilted. “You’re sure about that?”

“Positive.”

“Then you’re free to go.” Sam kneels down to wipe away a trail of wet paint and Andrew smiles before flickering into smoke. 

—

“I lied.” 

Sam is straddling him, balanced with one hand pressed back along his thigh, grinding his hips onto Dean’s cock in a lazy, summer rhythm. Dean hardly hears him the first time, it passes right by along with the sweat tipped flick of Sam’s hair against the nape of his neck. 

“About?” He manages finally, trying to thrust upwards until Sam presses hard onto the ridges of his hip bones. 

“No,” he says absently. “I’m moving, not you.”

“Jesus Christ,” he breathes. “Then actually move already.” 

Sam lifts up onto his shins and dragging his hips back and forth until Dean is sure he’ll go mad from it. His eyes fall shut to the blue haze of lantern light. “What’d you lie about, Sammy?”

Sam’s fingernails scratch at his nipples as he tips forward, one hand pressed to the mattress, whispering into Dean’s ear. “About how I got you out of the police station.” Dean’s breath catches as he tongues at the slope of his neck. “No monopoly money, no FBI badge.”

“How?” Dean gasps, hazy and pleasure pliant. 

“I can make people do things, but I’ve gotta really want it.” Sam’s grabbing his own cock now, moving his hand in time to the thrust of his hips, moaning his confessions into Dean’s ear. “When I left you in the interrogation room, I pulled a cop aside, told him to keep the lower holding ward clear. One guard took care of the cameras, the other led you out.”

“Sam,” he whispers, chasing his brother’s mouth. 

Sam pulls away, up and out of Dean’s reach, a hand splayed across his windpipe. “I could’ve done the same with the cop in the parking lot. I just had to tell him to put the gun down.” 

The pressure of Sam’s palm at the base of his neck is enough to have Dean riding the edge. He manages to speak, but only just. “You didn’t want me to know?”

Sam smiles then, a bit of hellfire shining through. “No,” he says, pressing his fingers into Dean’s mouth and pushing down on his tongue. “I just wanted to kill him.” 

Sam comes at his own admission, streaking Dean’s chest and dipping onto his chin. It’s the taste of his brother’s fingers in his mouth that pushes Dean over, eyes closing against his will, moaning into the pads of Sam’s fingertips. Sam rides him through it, moving his hips in gentle little circles, kissing dotted lines against his collarbones until finally he’s still. 

“At first,” he whispers. “I would lay in bed and I would wish that I could talk to you. And then you’d call, with one of your stupid excuses. It was like a fluke, like a coincidence, but then it would happen over and over again. I pictured that house in Missouri and I wanted to know if you remembered it like I did, if you could still make cornbread, and a minute later you called.” 

The question is heavy on Dean’s tongue, but Sam answers before he can push it through his teeth. 

“I haven’t ever done more than make you call me, Dean.” He smiles against his skin. “I never had to. You’re made for me. Why would I bother to change you?”

Dean can think of a hundred reasons, beginning with the smooth skin at the base of Sam’s neck, the shifting colors in his eyes, the peaking white beds of his nails. But Sam seems to think he’s something worthy of this body, and Dean is not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. 

Sam pulls off of him, landing at his side, tucking his head under Dean’s chin like he’s still four foot nine and all of a hundred pounds. “Once,” he whispers, “I was sitting in the library. I had study group, but we were taking a break. It was just, maybe half a dozen kids, sitting at a table talking shit like their lives were important, like they were worth anything.”

Dean runs his fingers through his brother’s sweat damp hair, tucking long sections behind his ear while he speaks. “And I was thinking about that summer, about how peaceful it was here, and I wanted so badly to hear your voice. So I reached for it. It’s like hot wiring a car, you gotta cross the right colors, and then my phone rang.”

“I was dreaming about Nitro before I called,” he says, speaking softly into the crown of Sam’s head. 

Sam sighs his name. “I know.”


	4. Chapter 4

Fog rolls in thick most evenings, laying heavy by the time the sun is down and burning off before noon. Dean wakes to greyed out window panes, like the world outside is gone except for their frosted little corner of box springs and twisted sheets. Sam is half asleep with his lips against Dean’s shoulder blades, his wrists tucked against his chest. 

“Bobby will be here before the fog’s gone,” he murmurs, eyes still closed. “Earlier than we expected. He did ninety through all of Tennessee.”

“Is that your way of telling me that morning sex is out of the question?” 

“You’re welcome to fuck me,” he says. “But don’t expect me to stay awake for it.”

“Kinky, Sammy. Always knew you were the type.”

Sam is fast asleep by the time Dean finally manages to pull himself from his lock hold. He’s not usually much of an earlier riser, but today he is motivated by the damning evidence of their newly explored relationship left littered around the house. Dean sets the coffee to brew and gets to cleaning, picking up tissues and collecting their clothing left strewn across the house. Sam appears in the kitchen seconds before he hears the rumble of the Impala as far out as Waterworks Road, taking the hills of Nitro like a born fucking climber.

Sam is watching him, a slight shake of his head to accompany his laughter. “Look at you,” he says. “Happy to have everything you love back in one place?”

Dean nods in agreement, moving to hover at the back window, unable to see anything but the hazy slip of fog. “She sounds like she’s running fine.”

“Bobby wouldn’t bring her doing anything less.” 

Bobby takes the corner just five miles an hour short of too fast and the second he has the Impala in park Dean is hurrying past Sam, barefoot on the uneven pavement. He runs his fingers along her hood looking for scratches or nicks or God forbid, dents. 

“Nice to see you too,” Bobby mumbles, ignoring Dean’s sweet nothings whispered into her paint job as he gives Sam a gruff, one armed hug. “You’re looking alright, Sam.”

“You too, Bobby.” 

“But you need a haircut.” It’s Bobby’s customary childhood greeting and Dean snorts from where he’s crouched low inspecting the tires.

“Leave him alone, it’s only just beginning to grow out.” He stands, walking gingerly on early sun warmed pavement, and pulls Bobby into a hug. “Glad you came.”

“Like I could leave you two morons alone after that stunt y’all pulled. John Winchester would be rolling in his grave if there was anything left of him to turn.” 

“It was sloppy,” Sam agrees, leading them back to the house. “But it worked, didn’t it?” 

“Well enough,” he admits, pushing open the screen door and ushering Dean through. “Was still fuckin’ stupid though.”

Bobby spends all of a half hour sipping coffee at their makeshift kitchen table before he’s up and running like a damn blood hound, quizzing Sam on the books stacked along the living room wall and inspecting their salt lines with silent disapproval. It isn’t long before his attention is turned towards their bare cupboards. “Do you even have food here?”

“Actually,” Sam admits. “We usually restock on Thursdays.”

Bobby sends one last glance back at the spines of a few stray lore books. “Well then let’s head to town. Dean can hold down the fort.” He learned early that the best way of handling the Winchesters is a system of divide and conquer. Bobby has questions, and Sam will get the first interrogation. 

Dean waves them off and spends the rest of his morning sipping lukewarm coffee with one of Sam’s books open in his lap. His brother’s notes are written on carefully placed yellow-lined stickies, like fragments of another language. The sudden crunch of gravel and the distant hum of an engine that most certainly is not the Impala pulls him from the living room and out the front door. 

He steps onto the grass just in time to see a high school kid climb out of a beat up old Camry. She’s all of seventeen and bleach blonde with a cheerleader crop top. 

“Really?” He asks, sitting back on the steps. “What happened to the old one, ‘Drew?” 

“Your summoning didn’t do my vessel any favors. I had to trade out for a newer model.” The girl is wearing jean shorts and shimmering brown eye shadow. Andrew sits down at his side, stretching out his legs, ankles crossed above little cloth white tennis shoes. 

“Tragic,” Dean says and really it probably should be. 

“So,” he begins, nudging Dean’s shoulder with a soft sway of his stolen body. “Did you have a good heart-to-heart with your brother?”

“Not exactly.”

He sighs. “You need to get caught up - sooner rather than later.”

“Why does it matter?” 

“Because, Dean,” he begins, his teenage voice tight and serious. “I need to know that when the pieces begin to fall, you’ll still be on the board.”

“If it involves my brother, I will be.” 

He curls a lock of hair around and around his finger. “Trust me, Deano, this is the kind of thing you’ll want to know in advance.” Dean doesn’t answer, so he just pats his knee and sighs a bit breathy. “Talk to him.”

He leaves in a cloud of exhaust with a wave of costume bejewelled fingers out the window and Dean sits with his empty coffee mug and waits until he hears the roar of the Impala in the distance. 

Sam pulls grocery bags from the back seat, gesturing at Dean to meet him half way, and the second his foot hits the front steps he swallows heavy and clenches his jaw, nostrils flared. 

“Trunk’s still full,” he says and Dean is itching to explain whatever stain Andrew left in his wake, but Sam is already nudging by him with grocery bags hooked around every finger while Bobby hollers his name.

They spend dinner in a carefully constructed act of platonic affection. They sit across from each other and bicker over how cooked their pasta should be and Bobby watches them with a fond smile over the neck of his beer bottle. “You boys haven’t changed a bit.”

It’s remarkable just how blind he is to the false cheer in Sam’s voice, the way his fingers fall just short of casual along Dean’s forearm. It’s harder than he thought it would be, after months of open doors and the freedom of Sam’s lips against his. 

He wants to talk about Andrew’s visit, to ask the question that remains lodged in his throat. Sam meets his eye across the table and smiles.

Bobby ties up their time until Sam begins complaining about a headache like a housewife from the suburbs and excuses himself to bed. Dean has half a beer to finish, so they sit on the porch, making do with the squeaking metal deck chairs. They look out over the hills at the light from the power plant, smoke plumes dyed a muted copper red. 

“Thanks for doing all this,” Dean says.

Bobby shrugs him off with a gruff, “Shut your mouth.”

“We appreciate it,” he insists. “I’m just saying.” He’s grateful for the midnight view, any excuse not to have to carry on a conversation while looking Bobby in the eye. 

“Well Lord only knows why you insisted on West Virginia, in a shack barely big enough to fit the whole of your brother.”

Dean laughs and it feels almost genuine. “It’s not really a problem.”

“You’re back to sharing bedrooms like you’re still in Sioux Falls.”

“It’s only temporary,” Dean says, though if he has his way Sam will never sleep alone again. 

The last of summer’s lightning bugs flicker out along the trees and the cicadas scream their death throes at a deafening pitch. “For the record,” Bobby says. “I never agreed with the way John handled the two of you. It wasn’t my place then, it probably ain’t now, but I just wanted you to know.”

Dean nods, barely a jerk of his head, and wonders what exactly Bobby is thinking of - which of John’s sins shines the brightest in his memory. “We know,” he says, answering for them both. “Anyway.” He sets his empty bottle down at the foot of his chair. “I think I’m off to bed.” 

“I might stay out here a bit longer. You go on.”

They say their good night’s and Dean closes the screen door with a careful hand, pausing to straighten the sheets left for Bobby on the couch. Back in their bedroom Sam is waiting for him, perched on the edge of the bed as if he’s been there all along.

“Did she try to hurt you?” He asks.

“No.” Dean sits beside him, elbows resting on his knees as his spine rolls out a day’s worth of latent anxiety. 

“Then what did she want?” 

“It goes by Andrew, Sammy, and leans towards blonde bombshells. I doubt this thing really has an identifiable gender, but that’s a guy’s name.” 

Sam smiles and knocks their knees together. “Then what did they have to say?”

“God, I hate you sometimes.” He takes a deep breath. “He wanted me to talk to you about this whole thing. Whatever it is you’ve been doing, you know?”

Sam’s eyes look yellow-gold in the low light. “He wanted you to stop me?”

“No,” Dean says as Sam takes his hand, tracing his palm with the tip of his finger like a well-worn psychic. “I think he wants me to help you.”

Sam hums, following his lifeline. “When Bobby leaves,” he says and Dean nods in agreement.

He pulls off his clothes, stripping down to boxers as Sam lays out across the bed, the ceiling fan running at too low a speed to do much of anything. Dean stretches out at his side, despite the heat, breathing in the smell of sweat and drug store aftershave.

“So Dad’s in heaven,” Dean says into his pillow, mindful of Bobby just a room away. Sam rolls over, pulling him close, arms tight around his chest. “Right?” Dean asks as Sam kisses the nape of his neck, soft and open mouthed. “He must be in heaven, because they still don’t have him.”

He traces an absentminded pattern against his sternum. “I don’t know,” is all he says.

“How?” Dean whispers, twisting in his arms until he can see the glassy reflection of his brother’s eyes. “How are you so sure about everything, but you still don’t you know where Dad is?” 

Sam may have written off their father when he was no more than a child, but something in Dean still tears itself to shreds at the very thought of John Winchester’s soul. Perhaps it was his implicit, careless role in his death, but he likes to think it’s something more basic, something in line with biology. 

“If there’s a heaven,” he begins, slow and soothing like he’s speaking to a child. “I’m not confident we can get into it.”

“But Dad - ”

“Humans,” Sam clarifies. “I think if there’s a heaven, it’s probably been locked for a long, long time.”

“Why?” He asks as Sam’s fingers rest at the edge of his pulse point. 

“Hell got closer than you will ever know to making earth its tenth circle and it wasn’t heaven that stopped it.” 

Dean hears what he decided not to say, the grudging admission of their father’s single virtue. “Then what do you think happens when we finally bite it? Is there anything other than hell?”

“Dust to dust?” Sam asks, tracing his fingers up and down Dean’s spine in a steady, sleepy rhythm. 

Oblivion sounds desolate and absolute. “But not for us,” he says.

Sam shifts, pulling him closer. “Not for us.” Of this, at least, he sounds certain.

—

There’s a leak in the bay window that looks out along the valley. The wood is old and cracking, rotted from the inside after years of water damage and carpenter ants. Every time a proper summer thunderstorm rolls in, water pours in like a riverbed along the center of the windowpane. 

“You boys really haven’t looked into fixing that?” Bobby asks as the wind howls outside, rattling the frame to the screen door. Dean looks up from where the sits, reading an old seventies Steven King thriller while Sam looks on in distaste.

“You’re better than that,” Sam says, eyeing the book cover with a frown.

“Shut up and go get a towel.”

It isn’t long before one of their bath towels is soaked through with rain water and the storm is only getting worse. Trees bend on the mountain paths and high grass lies flat with every gust of wind. Dean presses a bowl to the window once a second leak springs up and it collects inches in the span of seconds. 

“One hell of a storm,” he says, mopping up water as Bobby watches out the window.

“Yeah.” He’s silent after that, but thunder is quick to drown it out.

“Wasn’t supposed to rain this weekend,” Sam says, turning a page of Dean’s book, left abandoned on the coffee table.

“Well you know how summer is up in these mountains,” Dean says. Bobby doesn’t turn to look at him, he just keeps staring at the glass. “Unpredictable weather is about the least of our problems.” 

The lights start to flicker as the storm begins to break. Sam never looks up from Dean’s book so he works on stemming the leaks until the rain finally stops. 

—

Dean’s interrogation comes the morning that Bobby leaves for South Dakota. He strong-arms Dean into coming to town for gas and to refill the orange plastic reserve that he keeps in the back of his truck during long hauls. They spend the ride in silence and for the first few miles Dean is sure that they’ve given themselves away, that Bobby has seen them for what they are. Dean might have come down with the dark after years of hunting, but he’s starting to think Sammy was born with it. 

It isn’t until they’ve braved the little two-pump gas station with its off brand attached market that Bobby even says a word. “I know Sam intends to go back to hunting,” he says and Dean’s neck cracks with the speed he turns to look at him.

“What?”

“But I don’t think he should be,” he continues. “You boys need to use this as an opportunity to get out. It’s not the first time hunters have been caught up in the law and it won’t be the last. We have ways around arrest warrants.”

“And manhunts?” Dean blurts out because he can’t really think of anything else to say. 

“Those too,” he says with a smile. “It’s not over, he can still have a life, you both can. He can go to law school on the east coast, maybe look into Yale.”

“Anywhere but Connecticut,” he says with a relieved sort of smile. Sam has never mentioned hunting, not once, but now that he considers it, Dean begins to feel the itch. 

“Just promise me you’ll try,” Bobby says. “Try to talk him out of it, he never could say no to you.”

“And what about me?” Dean asks, because there is no ivy league education in his future, no matter what the cops have to say about it. 

He shrugs like he hasn’t really considered it. “You’ll follow him,” he says, certain and clear.

“Yeah,” Dean agrees. “I probably will.” 

—

When the sound of the farm truck finally fades into the distance, Dean sighs and falls back against the cushions. “How far you think that thing’ll get before it breaks down on some mountain highway?” 

Sam doesn’t answer. Instead he pulls off his shirt by the collar, unbuttons his jeans with a flick of his fingers, and tilts his head back as he reaches down to palm himself through his briefs. 

“Yeah alright,” Dean agrees, pulling him back towards the couch. He’s between Sam’s legs in the seconds it takes for him to moan Dean’s name, pulling at the elastic until just the head of his cock is visible. He kitten licks at the slit as Sam shifts his hips in silent instruction. 

“Bobby’s not a mile away and you’re already - ”

“Been horny all week,” Sam says, cutting him off. “Now let me fuck your mouth.”

Sam pushes past his lips and keeps a bit of a rhythm for all of three minutes until Dean starts helping him along with the flat of his tongue. He has his eyes closed and is distantly thankful that his brother so enthusiastically enjoys having a dick in his ass because Dean’s not certain he could contend with Sam’s cock on a regular basis. He’s always been too appreciative of Sam’s beautiful figure to be jealous that he has a good inch on him in each direction.

“How many people have you killed?” It comes out more as a moan than a coherent question and Dean takes his mouth off of Sam’s cock long enough to look up at him and ask, “This really the time, Sammy?”

Sam arches back, shaking his head back and forth, goosebumps blossoming over his arms. “Fuck,” he whispers. “Just tell me.”

Dean wraps his hand around the base of Sam’s cock, tonguing thoughtfully at the head. “Are we counting witches as people?”

Sam’s eyes flutter open, another moan caught on his lips. “Yes.”

“Upwards of thirty, then, I’m guessing.” He strokes him one more time, base to tip, and Sam falls apart in his hand, coming over his stomach. Dean absentmindedly runs his fingers through the mess above his navel and reaches up, offering them to Sam’s parted lips. 

Sam’s tongue curls around his fingers, his eyes barely open anymore. “That get you off?”

“God, yes.” Sam whispers. 

“You’re pretty fucked up.” It’s more an observation than anything else.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “That alright?”

Sam has always hung his stars, but Dean’s only just beginning to see the constellations for what they really are. “You know it is.” He draws patterns on Sam’s abdomen, licking his stomach clean. “I thought you’d be ashamed of me.”

Sam smiles, his eyes towards the ceiling. There’s something feral in that look that Dean thinks he ought to recognize. “And I thought you’d be the one to put me down.”

“You should’ve known better.” Dean’s voice is soft and God, he should’ve. “There’s nothing you could do, not a single thing, that would make me even consider it.”

“I have dreams about taking people apart,” Sam leans over to whisper into his ear. “Piece by piece, like the broken watches Dad used to give me as a kid. I want every gear, Dean, and I want it messy.” He kneels down in front of him and tongues at the groove behind his earlobe, making him sigh low in his throat. “I used to be so afraid, so horrified with myself.”

“And now?” Dean asks. Sam is kissing down his neck, his fingers skimming over the edge of Dean’s boxers. 

“Now, I want it even more.” Sam’s hand slides down his stomach, until he’s cupping him in his hand, mouthing at a collarbone. “Because you don’t care, do you? You don’t care that I’m a monster.” 

Dean pulls his arms around his shoulders, manoeuvring their bodies into the positions they so loved as children. “Ellen always called us a matching set.” 

Sam smiles against his ribcage. “Like porcelain collectables, kept on the top shelf.” Sammy’s never been a porcelain doll, though Dean doesn’t say it. He’s a marble statue from ancient Greece, more valuable for all his missing parts. 

“You know I love you,” Sam whispers into his skin. 

Dean plays with the ends of his hair, curled and light in the humidity. “Yeah,” he says. “I do.” 

—

Sam wakes him up speaking. “His name was Azazel, the demon that killed Dad.” 

Dean feels the heavy drag of sleep still pulling at his eyelids even as Sam’s voice kickstarts his resting heartbeat. He keeps his eyes closed, but rolls over until they’re lying face to face. He hums for Sam to continue, his breath ghosting against his cheek.

“He was pretty high up in hell’s hierarchy and he’d been planning a coup that was four decades in the making.”

Dean imagines hell has no shortage of coup attempts, considering the types of souls it tends to hoard. He doesn’t say it and Sam continues. 

“His plan was to expand hell’s boarders, a turf war with earth, and he wanted something with just enough mixed blood to lead the charge. So he prepped a few sets of kids and let them grow like little science experiments.”

“Demon blood,” he says blearily, remembering Andrew’s answer. 

“Yeah,” Sam sighs. “Demon blood. I’m guessing Mom died trying to stop him. I’ve been able to find other kids, the ones I saw die, and their parents were alive for the most part. She almost seems like a fluke.”

Mary is a story to Sam, nothing more than a faded set of photographs. Dean hasn’t been sure since he was a teenager if his memories of her are real or imagined and he changes the subject to save himself the familiar sting of phantom pain. “So there’s more?”

“Yes,” Sam says. “But in my dreams there’s just me and you.”

“And what are we doing?” Dean is whispering, as if his voice could echo.

“We rule hell.” 

“Together?” His eyes are open now, watching as Sam smiles, bright and young. 

“Of course.” 

“I thought you said your visions don’t always come true.” But Dean is already considering it, because Sam always was the prince of their lonely motel towers and it’s only right that he has his own kingdom. 

“I’m not sure anymore. So many of them have, ones I always thought were impossible,” Sam admits. “But I know I want this one to. Think of what we could have, Dean.”

Eternity, is what he thinks of. He and Sam could have an absolute and undivided eternality. “So what do we do?”

“For now?” Sam asks, running his thumb up and down the path of Dean’s sternum. “Nothing. Azazel is out of commission and there’s not much I can do to throw in my bid. I’ll keep working on it and when the time comes we can act. Until then,” Sam leans forward, kissing him with a gentle glide of his tongue. “I thought maybe we could hunt.” 

Dean knows he isn’t thinking of poltergeists, salted and burned in an hour and a half while a fourteen year-old Sam watched from the back seat of the Impala. He wants something else entirely and as it turns out, Dean’s conscious relied fully on an imaginary little brother to give it life. 

“Hunting it is.” This version of Sam is far easier to please and he kisses Dean like it’s the simplest thing in the world. 

—

Sam brings home a stack of library print outs in lieu of newspapers with passages circled in orange highlighter. 

“You’ve been busy,” Dean says, scanning an article about missing hikers in Virginia, lost along a trail dubbed ‘the devil’s staircase.’ “There’s bears in Virginia,” he points out. “They’ve probably been eaten.”

Sam smiles and pushes a small stack of papers in front of him. It’s a collection of local police blotters, beginning out in Virginia and travelling in a steady line towards the Delaware border. The story sums up to a string of disappearances and no bodies, all young and attractive and relatively fit. Smack dab in the middle of Maryland is a teenager bled dry. 

He glances up at Sam, fingering the edge of the last report from Frederick. “Guessing you’ve caught up on all the shit Dad forgot to mention when we were kids.”

“Vampires.” If he could grin any wider, Dean imagines he would be.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Looks like vampires.” Dean doesn’t care much what it is they hunt, so long as he can get his hands dirty, and he knows without asking that Sam wants exactly the same thing.

“Right,” he says. “You better scope out the area around Hagerstown, see what’s left in the way of boltholes, because they’ve been going straight down seventy and I’m guessing their next stop won’t be far.”

“Already done,” Sam says, handing over a sickly yellow sticky note with an address scribbled across the center. “Abandoned farmland, just went into foreclosure a month ago. It’s unlikely to have squatters yet, equally unlikely to be closely watched.”

“Right,” Dean says. “We leave tomorrow?”

Sam inhales through his nose like he’s fighting for breath. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Tomorrow.”

—

Vampires look deceptively human when pumped full of half a quart of dead man’s blood and tied to a chair beneath the orange-tinted drop lights that they clipped to the wooden support beams. His head hangs in drowsy nods and Dean knows he would wake eventually, if they left him to sweat out. Instead Dean grabs a masonry nail from the set of six laid out across the floor and balances the tip along the first gap between his knuckles. 

“Ring finger and middle?” He asks.

Sam sits against the wall, watching. “Yes,” he whispers and Dean reaches for the hammer. 

The vampire wakes screaming the second the nail splits through wood but Dean hardly hears it, tuned instead to the sound of his brother breathing deep. He flips the second nail between his fingers, catching the glint of Sam’s eyes in the half light, glazed and bright. 

He sets the second nail against the vampire’s skin just as he snarls, “I’ll fucking kill you, hunter,” through spindled teeth. “And I’ll die before I give up my nest.” 

Dean shakes his head, balancing the familiar weight of the hammer in his hand. “We’re not looking for intel,” he says, bringing it down with enough force to split through the tendons stretched between his fingers. His hiss of pain is drowned out by the sound of Sam’s perfect, breathy gasp. 

Dean lets the vampire’s chin drop towards his chest again. His fingers twitch uselessly against the wooden armrests. “What the fuck do you want then?” 

“Nothing.”

He looks up, his eyes a startling sea-glass blue, and then he turns towards Sam. Dean flips the hammer in his hand and smacks him hard across the face with the heavy metal handle, satisfied with the echoing crack of his jaw. 

“Don’t you look at him,” Dean says, pulling him forward. “You look at him again and the next thing I’ll do is take your eyes out. Have I made myself clear?” 

“Don’t look,” he whispers, blood falling steady and thick from his open mouth. “But I can still smell him.”

“Wrong answer,” Dean says and reaches for another nail.

This isn’t the most efficient form of torture, not by half. If he really wanted to break something down, he’d be reaching for matches and paraffin instead. But Sammy wants blood, so Dean will save the fire. Instead he pounds little holes in the gaps between the vampire’s knuckles until blood drips from his fingertips. The nails cast shadows down the backs of his hands, messy and tilted.

He’s stronger than a human would be, spitting insults and fighting against the ropes, but Dean can already see what the shadow of his humanity is doing to his brother. Sam is watching them, his head tilted forward, running his fingertips up and down the inseam of his jeans. He arches his back off the chair and teases at the zipper and suddenly Dean wants this over, he wants a machete through this thing’s throat and his dick buried in his brother’s. 

“Oh,” the vampire says, listening to Sam’s teasing little movements, the soft gasps of air. “You enabler. Little brother is demon touched and you’re responsible for feeding the beast.” 

Dean hunts through his tool kit for a pair of needle nosed pliers and a screwdriver thick enough to bite on. He’s still talking, listing their Biblical sins, when Dean shoves the handle into his mouth. When they were children, John would take pliers to their milk teeth the second they began to move. Dean would flinch and resist and do his best to keep his loose molars a secret until the last possible second. But little Sammy never did need to wait on their father. At seven years old he sat crossed legged before a floor length mirror, tearing at his canine tooth until blood streamed down his fingers. “Got it,” he’d said, holding it triumphantly for his brother to see.

Dean smiles at the memory, gets a grip on one of his overlapping fangs, and pulls. Sam murmurs his name the second the tooth hits the ground. He has his jeans undone, his fingers hovering at the waistband of his briefs like he’s waiting for permission. 

“Want me to take more?” He asks. The vampire tries to force the bit from his mouth but Dean catches his chin and shoves his head back, pressing the handle deeper. 

“Yes,” Sam says, in the same, breathy whisper. He must still have a fixation for teeth, a childhood fascination that bled over into something considerably darker, because as Dean begins to set bloodied fangs in a row at the vampire’s feet, Sam is arching up into his own hand, moaning his brother’s name.

“Any other requests, Sammy?” He asks, setting down his pliers and looking over his little array of instruments. He thinks of flaying skin with the edge of a fixed game knife, but something tells him that’s not what Sam wants tonight.

“I want the gears,” he says, his voice hoarse. 

Dean takes a pipe wrench to the vampire’s knee until it shatters, the bone splitting enough for a compound fracture, and then he takes him apart. It’s messy, because for all of Dean’s strengths, amputation on a struggling patient does not appear to be one of them. His hands are slippery and he has to trade out his hunting knife for something with a serrated edge. Next time, he’ll remember to bring a saw. 

Sam has gone silent. He watches with his fingers gripping bruises into his thighs, his mouth slightly open and his eyes glazed. The vampire screams and screams but says nothing else. A human would have succumbed to shock by now and Dean is slowly seeing the wisdom of playing with something more resilient. 

Dean is severing the swollen arteries in his thigh, wishing he’d paid even a little bit of attention in high school anatomy, when Sam finally moves. Blood has soaked through the floorboards and cracked along the corners of his eyes, sticking like syrup to his boots and flaking off the dips in his collarbones. 

Sam sinks down, hitting the floor hard, kneeling at Dean’s side. He takes his face in his hands, smearing blood along the ridges of his cheekbones. He mouths his name and Dean pulls away. He reaches for the machete left in waiting beside the chair and takes off the vampire’s head in his only clean cut of the night. 

Sam is watching, still on his knees, falling like a puppet when Dean pushes him back and hovers over him, straddling his waist. The ends of Sam’s hair are dripping black and when Dean kisses him, he tastes blood. He pushes Sam’s jeans down past the curve of his hip, never taking his eyes off the flutter of his brother’s lashes.

“When I was eight year’s old, Dad left on a hunt and told me that no matter what happened, I had to protect you.” His own voice sounds unfamiliar as he threads his hands down the front of Sam’s briefs. “I cried myself to sleep that night, kept my hand pressed over my mouth so I wouldn’t wake you up.”

Sam’s mouth falls open as Dean spreads blood like precome along the head of his cock. He moves his thumb in mesmerizing little circles, knowing exactly how close he is. 

“I was scared,” he says, moving lower. Sam’s legs spread like it’s instinct. 

“Of what?” He barely breathes enough to whisper.

“Everything.” He pulls Sam’s jeans down to his knees as he slides along the blood soaked floor, pressing a kiss to his inner thigh. “Monsters, ghosts, failing at my one and only job. For about a week I didn’t sleep at all.”

Sam pushes up onto his elbows, watching as Dean hesitates, his fingers tight around the base of his cock. “Then I finally realized that failing just wasn’t an option. I would figure it out, I would do anything.” He lowers his hand along the soft skin of Sam’s perineum, his fingers sticky with blood.

“It’s amazing, what that kind of thinking does to a kid. I gave up my boundaries at eight year’s old, Sammy.” He finally lowers his mouth over his brother’s cock, hollowing out his cheekbones with an exaggerated pull of his lips. His fingers inch upward finding him already slick with something far thinner than blood.

“Oh,” he breathes, pulling off. “You came prepared.”

Sam’s smile is wicked until Dean presses two fingers inside him without warning, causing his head to hit the ground with a hollow thud. “Oh fuck, I’m going to come.” He’s been riding the edge for an hour now, so Dean lowers his mouth back down, sliding his fingers in and out of him with the slightest crook until Sam’s back arches and his lips part in a deep, heady moan. 

Dean was never much of a swallower, but now he takes every fucking drop, letting Sam press back against his throat on instinct, sliding a third finger into him just as he begins to come down. 

Sam moans, pushing a hand through his hair and slicking it back with blood. “You still gonna fuck me?”

“It’ll probably hurt,” he says, undoing his own jeans and pushing Sam’s knees back. 

“Jesus, Dean.” He laughs his name. “It had fucking better.”

—

Dean sits at their makeshift kitchen table with a guide to home butchering open in front of him. Old pen-drawn diagrams show cattle sectioned with dotted lines, creating perfectly sized cuts of meat. Each page slaughters a different animal in sanitized black ink. Sam has taken to running with a dedication that Dean lacks and he hears the screen door clatter as he returns home with sweat drenched hair, kicking off his tennis shoes onto the living room floor. Dean turns to a two-page spread of lamb offal. 

“Are you actually reading something other than Steven King?” Sam asks, opening each cabinet in his daily attempt to find the glassware. 

“Picture book,” Dean says and Sam laughs, pausing only to swallow down tap water. He stops with the glass raised to his lips as Dean turns the page to a chart of venison muscle structure. 

“Picture book,” Sam repeats, his voice gritty from his run and the thick pull of saliva. 

“Yep.” The book instructs him to begin with the hooves, cutting at an angle. 

Sam’s breath catches and Dean smiles wide. “Learn anything yet?” 

“Loads.” He says, watching Sam’s fingertips go white against the glass. “Figured I’d better study up if I plan on giving you proper a show. I was thinking next we could track some ghouls. What do you think?”

Sam’s eyes are hell glazed. “Yeah,” he manages. “Sounds good.”

—

For the long, dry stretch of autumn they hunt. Dean has found his calling in the careful thrum of the circulatory system. He borrows outdated anatomy books from the library and takes his own notes on the world’s many variations. Shifters, as it happens, are a perfect mirror image of humanity while ghouls have a few missing pieces lost to their blackened veins. 

Sam still prefers to watch, though occasionally he dips his fingers into whatever gore Dean has trailed out to lay at his feet. But more often he sits back and watches Dean’s little performance like a live art show, like a sculpture coming together. It always ends with Sam drinking the blood from his tongue while Dean gives into the black desire to hear his little brother scream. But Sam doesn’t give it to him easy, instead he runs his mouth, bowed onto his forearms as Dean fucks him from behind, one hand on the razor edge of his hip and the other pushing down against his spine. 

“Think you could take your knife to a human?” He murmurs into the floorboard. “Think you could fuck me in real blood?” 

He’s covered in it, too dark and too viscous to pass for human. It blackens his chestnut hair to mahogany and Dean takes a vicious handful in response. His head snaps back, but Sam just keeps on talking. “A real person wouldn’t last. You’d have to take fingers instead of limbs, you’d have to take it slow.” 

“Shut up,” he gasps, because every word has him edging closer than he ought to be, a fantasy that has no place behind his eyelids. 

“God, Dean, can you imagine the screaming?” 

Dean comes when Sam begs him, whispering frantically into the floorboards. “Just one,” he says. “Let’s just have one.”

He doesn’t answer and Sam, to his credit, doesn’t ask again.

—

They used to share the colored comics from the Sunday newspaper over breakfasts of stale cereal and toast with clear Karo syrup. Dean always gave Sam the larger page first, keeping the little two-sided insert because even back then Sam could read twice as fast as he could. They would flip each page with sticky fingers and chuckle to themselves, pointing out the best sections when they finally swapped across the table. 

Dean feels his heart race like he’s on a hunt when one morning he wakes to a newspaper left in plastic on their front step. “Sam!”

“I know,” he says from where he’s sitting on the couch, tightening his laces for his morning run. “I signed us up last time I was at the library. Figured we could do five bucks a week, even if it’s just for the funnies.”

Sam runs his roadside track and Dean cooks a full breakfast of scrambled eggs and thick sliced bacon from the grocery in town. He plays a bit of Zeppelin from Sam’s open laptop, humming along, and as he watches the fog lift through the kitchen window Dean thinks about Sam’s promise of eternity. 

“Look at you,” Sam says, sweaty and flushed, his shirt sticking to his skin as he leans down to bite gently at the length of Dean’s neck. “Thanks for breakfast, Martha.” He steals a piece of bacon from the grease blotted paper towels that line the serving plate. 

Dean rolls his eyes and dishes up, setting the funnies down next to their mismatched chairs. “They got rid of the Far Side,” Sam comments, frowning. 

“Still have Garfield, though,” he says. 

Sam snorts with laughter and Dean can’t quite focus on the paper, too caught up in watching Sam read, a smile playing at his lips, sweaty and fresh faced and so fucking perfect that his chest hurts when he exhales. “We should buy Karo,” Dean says, finally.

Sam hums in agreement. “Remind me next time I go to the library, I’ll stop at the country store and grab some.” 

Dean considers watching his brother grow old in the clutches of the West Virginia mountains and suddenly hell doesn’t seem so terrifying anymore. 

—

“Well, I didn’t expect this.” 

Dean is shoving a shopping basket full of frozen dinners and deli meats when a little girl in jeans and brown riding boots pauses at his side and traces her fingers along a tub of Neapolitan ice cream. Her hair is so blonde it’s nearly white and Dean does his best not to look her in the eye.

“Gotta eat. Plus I lost the coin toss for a grocery run.”

They pass an overweight couple with a shopping cart and Andrew slips his little-girl hand into Dean’s. “Silly Daddy,” he says, high and sweet, lowering his voice once the couple finally pass. “I meant your newly acquired hobbies. Torture, evisceration, and incest.” 

“Jesus, shut up.” He snaps, pulling his hand away. 

“Though the incest is hardly new,” he continues, grinning with a mouth full of little milk teeth. 

Dean makes a bee-line for the register, biting his tongue when Andrew picks out a Hershey’s bar to set alongside their weekly groceries. He snatches the plastic bags away from the cashier and leads them both right out the door.

“Get in,” he says, opening the passenger door, gritting his teeth at the way his hands slide down the interior. “You had to meet me in a grocery store?”

He kicks his legs over the edge of the upholstery while Dean revs the engine and Andrew’s stolen voice hums a little verse in response. “You’ve been avoiding me,” he says. “And that house is warded like a lock box. So, where are we headed?” He twists in his seat to dig through one of the grocery bags until he emerges victorious with the chocolate bar. 

“Home,” he says and Andrew’s little fingers falter as he pulls back the wrapper. “If you want to talk to me about Sam, you’ll do it in front of him.”

“Well,” he begins, turning to gaze out the window. “To be honest I was hoping we could do this without involving your brother.”

“Why?” Dean asks, gritting his teeth.

“Because he’s far more capable of killing me.”

“Oh, come on,” he says, taking a left-hand turn a bit faster than he ought to. “Hell can’t be that bad.”

“No,” Andrew agrees. “But I didn’t say he’d exorcize me.” He pauses then, gazing up at Dean with hazel, child light eyes. “It’s amazing, what he can do, now that he’s finally stopped fighting it.”

He stays silent for the rest of the ride, watching out the window with feigned interest, turning to gaze at the deep mouths of the power plants situated over the east side of town. Autumn has brought fewer foggy days to the mountains, with clear afternoons replacing the humidity and air pollution of summer. Today is not one of them. 

Sam is waiting on the front porch, dressed down in a flannel shirt and a pair of Dean’s sweatpants that sit too high at his ankles. 

“He’s here for you,” Dean tells him, breezing past them both with grocery bags twisted in his fingers. He can hardly stand to watch the way Andrew walks, with downy blonde curls at his shoulders, and he certainly doesn’t want to hear that voice any longer.

“Andras,” Sam says.

“Andrew,” he corrects him, just as the screen door clatters shut behind him.

Dean puts away groceries with a slow, meticulous hand that would make Sam proud if he weren’t so blatantly avoiding him. It doesn’t take him nearly as long as he’d like, so instead he rests his forearms on the counter and stares out across the unruly grass in the back yard. Winter falls late this far south and from here it looks just like summer. He allows himself a handful of slowly passing minutes before he retraces his steps to find Sam and Andrew standing toe to toe in the grass. 

“What’re you kids up to?” Dean asks, arms crossed as he lingers on the front steps.

“Strategizing,” Sam says just as Andrew chirps “Bribery,” from his bitten red lips.

“Don’t act as if I’m twisting your arm. You’ve been following Dean around for months.”

“Perhaps I just like the view.” Andrew’s tar slick grin looks the same in every vessel. 

“Watch your step,” Sam says with an easy smile which Andrew quickly returns. 

“I suppose I should be going.”

“Yes, you should,” Dean agrees and Sam must sense it, how that little girl’s shoulders remind Dean of when Sammy was just that size, because he stops Andrew with a soft hum to his voice. 

“One last thing,” he says, tightening his hand into a fist, clutching at air. “No more children.” 

Her mouth opens wide and ash spills out, soaking into the ground like a slow motion retreat as Andrew falls back to the depths of hell. Dean catches her body before it hits the ground. Her pulse is a butterfly’s touch against his fingertips, but it’s there.

“Sam?” He asks, cradling her body to his chest.

“Like my new parlour trick?” His eyes are demon-dark and his skin is covered in a light sheen of sweat, the only hint of shine in a world of matte fog. He lifts her up, her knees hooked over his forearms, and Sam’s eyes turn soft as he gestures towards the road. 

“Do you want to go drop her off at the hospital? I’m sure her parents are looking for her. I can convince the nurses on staff that we found her along the road side.”

Dean is fairly certain her parents are dead, throats slit and bodies left to rot in their once happy home. “Sure,” he says. “Go get some shoes on, I’ll lay her in the back.”

—

There’s still blood under his fingernails, but it passes for dirt in the poorly lit diner on the skirt’s edge of Ohio, three hours north of Nitro. The waitress is a bottle blonde in her early forties and Dean imagines she’s probably a mother, working for tips and mornings spent with her kids. Sam recites his order with his best college boy grin and when she reaches for his menu their hands brush. 

“Oh!” She says, grasping at his fingertips, cupping his hands in her frail little palms. “You’re freezing.” 

“The seasons are turning,” he says, smiling. “And we’ve had a long night.”

“Well, you know what they say, cold hands, warm heart. I can bring some coffee for you boys, if you’d like.”

Sam accepts for them both, thanking her, squeezing her hands gently in his own. Dean wets his lips and watches as he pulls away, as his hands fall back into place on the edge of the table, hands that were wrist-deep in a siren’s ribcage an hour earlier. Dean had cracked it open with a bone saw, letting Sammy peak inside. 

“Warm heart,” he repeats, when she’s finally out of earshot. 

Sam snorts into his tap water. “For you, anyway.”

—

Dean gets sloppy and he gets hurt. They track a rugaru that’s been swallowing bodies all the way to Knoxville and corner it waterside on a river leading into the Smoky Mountains. It snarls and snaps and turns like a predator when it says, “Stay away.” 

It sounds like it’s forgotten how to speak and a voice like that will inevitably break the illusion. Dean takes one look at Sam, a cautious shrug of his shoulder, before it’s on him, forcing his knees to buckle like buildings as they both hit the ground. Sam calls his name just as its teeth sink deep into his shoulder, tearing out a chunk of flesh.

Dean struggles but it’s strong, stronger than he is, and his limbs are slow with shock as its hand closes tight around his throat. Sam is behind them in an instant, ramming a hunting knife into its spine and forcing it upwards, severing nerves along with skin. It twitches above him and Sam drags it back, pulling it deeper into the forest, a hand gripping hard at the back of its neck. Dean tastes blood and some old Tennessee earth as he struggles to sit up, not wanting to waste Sam’s wrath on stargazing.

Sam dumps their entire recycled bottle of gasoline over its head, catching his own hand in the down pour. Dean thinks he’ll smell of it for days. It will linger on the sheets as they curl into each other’s bodies. 

Sam digs out his lighter and steps back just in time to avoid the blaze. It screams like an animal and Sam watches it burn with the yellow flames reflected in his eyes. Dean’s shoulder aches and Sam is beside him the second he makes a sound, involuntary and quiet as he shifts his weight to his right side.

“Stop moving,” Sam murmurs, touching his face, streaking gasoline against his cheek. “Let me look.”

“Not my worst,” Dean says, glancing down at the torn skin. Sam’s fingers ghost lightly around the edges of the wound, wiping away blood to assess the damage.

“No,” Sam agrees. “Not your worst.”

“You got him before we had time to play, Sammy.” He feels the familiar, unpleasant rush of blood loss and Sam laughs like a distant sigh.

“Come on, then. Let’s get back to the Impala.” The rugaru has burned down to cinders, creeping along the edges of wet leaves and pine needles.

“Think we’ll light up the Smokies?” Dean asks as Sam pulls him into line, a hand tucked around his waist like the prom date he never was.

“Too wet,” Sam says. “Now come on.”

They walk slow, too slow for Dean’s liking, but Sam is careful of the upturned roots and slippery ground. “Sammy, I’m not-” 

“I know,” Sam says into his hair, his nose brushing against his temple as he inhales smoke and gasoline like cologne. “Maybe I have a thing for it tonight.”

“What?” Dean asks with a snort. “Playing doctor.”

Sam hums and Dean feels it in his fingertips. “We’ll wrap you up right so you can sleep on the way home. And then I’ll ride you nice and slow while the sun comes up.” The Impala is parked half-way into the forest, invisible except for the gleam of chrome in the moonlight.

“We better hurry if we’re gonna make sunrise,” he says. 

Sam sits him in the passenger seat and kneels on the wet ground, shushing him as he pulls out their first aid kit and uncaps a bottle of sterilized water. Dean hisses when he pours it over the bite mark on his shoulder, cleaning away grime and blood so Sam can inspect him with eyebrows clinched close. 

“If this were a knife wound, you’d need stitches. But this is too messy.” 

Dean shrugs and immediately regrets it. “Got some vicodin stashed away there?” 

Sam digs out a little bottle of pills which he rattles before Dean’s eyes, a promise of relief coupled with the threat of the rubbing alcohol poured into his cupped hand. Dean groans and lets his head hang, the burn of alcohol igniting fires behind his eyelids. “Narcotics now, please.” 

“Careful,” Sam says, as he watches him swallow back two white pills dry. “Or you won’t be able to get it up in a few hours.”

Dean smiles as he chases the pain medicine with a few swallows of water. “Such a slut.”

Sam pulls the wrappings around his shoulder just a little too tight. “Our plans were ruined,” he says, sounding a bit like he did as a teenager, entitled and wanting. “And I have your blood all over me.”

Dean hums in agreement because he is beautiful like this, riled up and raw. “Let’s go then, Sammy. You’ve basically mummified my arm already.” 

“Compression is important, especially when I can’t stitch you,” Sam reminds him. But he’s already helping him back into the car, digging out the blankets they leave tucked in the back because his baby doesn’t have much in the way of insulation in these mountains. He wraps Dean carefully in an afghan taken from their living room. It smells like sweet milk and Nitro. 

They drive in absolute darkness along the bends of Wears Valley until they pass by Knoxville and the street lights set everything aglow. The vicodin does its work, blurring the harsh lines of his injured shoulder into nothing but a dull ache. Sam looks so young like this, dirty like he was as a kid, perpetually mud-covered from his creek expeditions and tours through Oakland fields. 

“Hey Sammy,” he begins, his eyes drifting shut. “Did you like college?”

Sam is quiet for a moment, though he answers like he always does, patient and knowing. “I did. Though I would’ve liked it more if you came with me.”

“You should’ve asked, then.” Each pass of a highway light flickers to black behind his closed eyelids, like a train in a lit tunnel. 

“I only asked a thousand times, unless you’ve forgotten.”

Dean hasn’t forgotten a single thing about the night Sam left, and the tells him so. “I meant after.”

“I did then, too,” Sam says, though it’s softer this time, and his fingers are in his hair. “Go to sleep, Dean. I want wild sex in approximately five hours and I need you conscious for it.”

“You don’t really,” Dean points out with a heavy tongue. “I’m up for whatever.” 

He can’t see Sam’s smile, but he can imagine it. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

—

Dean takes to walking once the last of the leaves have fallen and the weather cools enough to break the humidity. Sam calls it hiking, even jokes about finding him a walking stick, but it feels more like aimless exploration. When he was young, Dean remembers staring desperately at the dark deep of the forests that engulfed the north east and the thick wooded mountain ranges of the southern coasts. He wanted nothing more than to lose himself in those woods, to cut his way through the bush like Lewis and Clark and play at explorer, if only for a day. But Dean had a child to raise and weapons to clean to spotless perfection so he kept his wanderlust tucked away with all of the other things he wished for when staring out of car windows. 

Now, some mornings, Dean just walks into the woods with their father’s old compass in his pocket and a bag packed with lunch slung over one shoulder. He learns every square foot of the forest surrounding their house. He makes his own paths up to the mountains, marked with sigils carved into the bark of old fallen trees. Sam picks out books from the library filled with plant diagrams and illustrations, guides to the West Virginia wildlife. 

Dean walks until the rain starts, drops that fall heavy against the back of his neck, setting the forest alight with the crackle of dead leaves. He takes a shortcut home, bypassing his careful trails, stopping only to pull a handful of leaves off of a fern growing low to the ground and faded to yellow. He folds them into his pocket, hoping that he might find the plant’s name in one of the books left open on their bed. 

He’s soaked through by the time he reaches the crumbling rock wall fence that surrounds their property, but winter this year hasn’t offered much in the way of cold, so Dean hardly feels the chill. He toes off his shoes at the doorway and begins unbuttoning his flannel but stops abruptly when he notices the acidic bite of sulphur in the air. 

“Sammy?” He calls, his feet damp against the linoleum floor.

“In here.” Sam is sitting on the ground, books stacked perilously tall at his side as he takes notes in a furious legal scrawl.

“Everything alright?”

Sam glances up at him and breaks into a smile at the sight of Dean dripping rainwater onto the floor. “I see you’ve finally had a bath.” 

Dean snorts, unbuttoning his shirt until he can just pull it up over his head. “I smelled sulphur.”

“We had a visitor.” Sam says, setting down his pen as Dean pulls off his undershirt as well.

“Andrew?” He struggles with the wet stick of denim, but eventually he tosses his jeans in a pile with the rest of his clothes. 

“No,” Sam says, pushing the coffee table back just an inch, making room for Dean to fold himself down onto his lap. He licks rainwater from the long curve of his neck, his hands warm and dry against his hips. “I’ve been making some connections.” 

Dean hums as Sam kisses his way down to his collarbone. “Connections?”

“Deals,” Sam says against his skin. 

“What kinds of deals?” He pulls back, forcing Sam to look him in the eye. 

“Alliances,” Sam amends. “Or something like it.”

“And?” Dean asks. A drop of cold water follows the curve of his spine, causing him to shiver just as Sam breathes warm air over his chin. 

“And I’ve been quite successful.”

“Good,” Dean whispers.

Sam stops his exploring, just a second of hesitation. “Is it?”

He has no desire to leave this life, where he walks for miles in overgrown forests and hunts to dismember and fucks his brother bare. But Sammy wants a kingdom and Dean will never, ever deny him that. 

“Yeah,” he says, licking into Sam’s mouth for a brief tangle of a kiss. “It is.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Someone’s here.” Sam’s eyes are closed where he lays beneath him, the blood of a skin walker drying tacky between the linoleum floor and the small of his back. Dean is reaching for his gun in the seconds it takes for the words to leave his mouth, aiming for the flimsy door, held shut with a set of chains linked through the hole where a doorknob once was. For a single, breath taking second, Dean sees a flash of movement through the gaps in the chains, an eye peering through the makeshift keyhole. 

“He ran. Maybe we should’ve kept the mutt around,” he says, jerking his thumb back at the body left in pieces along the floor. “Could’ve sniffed ’em out for us.”

“It’s a girl.” Sam is watching him, running a lazy hand up and down his own chest, pausing to thumb at his nipples, smearing blood down to his navel. “She’ll run for the woods,” he says. “There’s nothing we can do about her now.”

“Then we gotta hit it. She might bring someone back, call the cops.” He zips his jeans and tucks his gun into the back of his waist band before coming to kneel at Sam’s side.

“Probably,” Sam agrees. He runs a hand through Dean’s hair, grown slightly longer than he usually tolerates at Sam’s request. “Kiss me,” he says. 

Dean leans down, his arms bracketing Sam’s shoulders just as he presses up to meet him. “Is she going to be trouble?” He murmurs against his brother’s lips.

“Who knows?” Sam breathes, still wrapped in that sleepy, distant place inside himself that Dean has come to associate with sated bloodlust and late summer afternoons. 

“I have a feeling that you do,” he says, pushing himself back onto his feet. He begins to pull up the tarp that he’d spread across the floor, careful of the pooling blood and loose tools. Sam watches, lazy and pliant, his hair haloed against linoleum. 

“You know there isn’t much point in me laying this down if you end up getting blood all over the floor anyway.”

Sam hums, his eyes closed. “You always bring the peroxide.” 

“Yeah, in a spray bottle.” He packs his tool kit back into its black polyester carrier. Those he cleans at home. “I’m not exactly walking around with gallons of the stuff.”

Sam shifts his hips in little empty circles as Dean bags body parts and ties them off in a bow. “I don’t have time to fuck you,” he points out. “And I’m not going to get to burn the body, either. It’ll have to wait until we’re in the mountains again.”

“It’ll keep,” he breathes. “Though I may not.” 

Dean drags him to his feet and shoves garbage bags into the lax grip of his fingers. “Load up, cowboy.” 

They’re crawling down seventy-nine towards the border, where hunting fires burn constantly and mountain lakes move fog over valley fields. Sam has blood flaking off his skin in uneven patches of rust and red. He’s humming, distracted, just under his breath. 

“White Rabbit?” He asks. “You hate that song.” 

“Go ask Alice,” Sam sings, like he would as a child, trying to annoy his big brother into changing the track. “When she’s ten feet tall.”

Rain spatters against the windshield like seventies percussion and Dean waits for the orange flood lights that line the interstate to fade into the deep dark of West Virginia.

—

“She followed us, you know.” They traced a hunt to North Carolina, a far cry west from the humid wasteland of Elizabeth City, but to Dean it feels just the same. He snorts and Sam smiles. He doesn’t need psychic jumbo in his head to clue him in to the shadow of a hunter at their backs. He knows they’re being followed. 

The air from the cracked open window smells of cigarette smoke and Wednesday morning trash pickup and Dean thinks of sulphur. “Are you sure this is gonna work, Sammy?” 

Sam skewers a crouton on his flimsy diner fork. “You want to talk about that here?”

The diner is nearly empty, save for a two in the morning drunk and a waitress painstakingly texting on a little flip phone. 

“I just wanna hear you say it,” Dean says. His appetite is gone to the prickling feeling at the back of his neck. “Is it a sure thing?”

“Nothing’s a sure thing.” Sam says.

“But we’ll be together. No matter who wins the bid.” He thinks of it as a football draft and Sam hasn’t done much in the way of correcting him. When Sam smiles, it’s bright and genuine and it sets Dean’s paranoid heart still. 

“You think there’s any room left in heaven for you?” He asks.

“Depending on who you ask, all I’ve really done is save people.” Dean’s not sure if God is out there or if he would even account for all the thoughts he has when Sam is stretched out below him, covered in blood and gasping. 

“Maybe,” Dean begins, his stomach turning with the thrill of what so nearly slips off his tongue. “Maybe we should be looking for this girl, this hunter. Set her straight.” 

“You’ll come with me,” Sam reaches across the table for Dean’s wrist. “Either way, you’ll come with me. I’ll make sure of it.”

“I know. But it wouldn’t hurt, would it? Having a backup plan?” It’s evil and twisted and black and Dean’s mouth waters with it. He needs to be sure that he’s as damned as his brother.

Sam knows better than to kiss him in a little North Carolina strip mall town, but he looks like he wants to. “Let’s go home,” he says. “Back to the motel. We can talk about it some more.” 

Dean pays at the register and they leave hungry. 

“She’s worrying you.” Sam crumples his oversized body into the passenger seat of the Impala as Dean starts the engine with itchy fingers. 

“Everything worries me about this.” Dean has found simple, everyday happiness in Nitro. He’s always had his brother to lose, but in a way even that felt inevitable. He spent his adolescent years with the lingering certainty that Sam would one day walk out the door to build a life that Dean had no place in. But Sam is his now, every inch of him, and Dean can’t let that go.

“She’ll come,” Sam says, playing idly with the slider on the radio. “If one of us is alone.”

“We’re never alone,” Dean says.

“Then it’s about time you went out. What was the last bar you even stepped foot in?” 

“No clue.” It was Ellen’s place, before their father died. 

“Alright,” Sam says, settling back. “It’s decided then. We kill a bit of time and then you go lay the bait at a local dive.” 

The florescent hotel lights flicker like a bad eighties horror movie when they pull into the parking lot. Sam hums to himself as he unlocks the door and Dean has to adjust his jeans with a shift of his hips. Sam is beautiful under street lights, with his high cheekbones and gold leaf eyes, but Dean thinks he’s always looked best in the muted glow of incandescent motel lamps. 

Dean has received his fair share of compliments. Amanda Walsh once cornered him at a party in his junior year, her breath smelling of cheap beer and her hair of even cheaper pot when she whispered, “Jesus, Dean, I wish I was half as pretty as you are,” against his lips. He wonders vaguely what Amanda Walsh would say about Sam, broad shouldered at twenty-four and in need of a haircut. 

He imagines he has at least an idea as he sinks to his knees and pushes Sam’s hips back against the wall. Sam hums in approval as he threads open his belt and draws his zipper down with quick fingers and Dean has his little brother nudging at his tonsils before Sam can do much more than adjust his footing. He sighs his name and allows his hand to linger at the base of Dean’s skull, tilting his hips forward as Dean swallows him back in a lovestruck rhythm. 

“We could do it, if you want,” Sam says, his voice low, his fingers wandering to trace the shell of his ear. 

Dean hums his question around Sam’s cock, tears barely caught in his lashes, his cheeks hollowed in perfect resistance. 

“The girl,” Sam says. “The hunter. If you wanted to, we could.” 

Dean moans this time, his fingers working at his own belt, frantically pushing his jeans down far enough palm at his cock before rubbing precome over the head with his thumb. Sam smiles with his eyes closed, his fingers tracing the outlines of his nipples through the ribs in his henley. 

“You wouldn’t have to do it alone,” he sighs, thrusting deep enough to cut off Dean’s airway, and holding it there for just a breath. “We could do it together. We could make it messy.” 

Dean pictures blood and the thrill of guilt makes his dick throb. He pulls back for just a moment, his lips raw and chapped as he presses a short kiss to Sam’s thigh. “Jesus,” he groans into his skin, but Sam is already moving him back into position, plucking his mouth open with a gentle press of his thumb.

“How long do you think she’d last?” He asks, pushing back in to Dean’s mouth, stopping just short of his throat. “Hours? Less?”

Dean’s barely even touching himself now, because Sam smells of salt and the distant tang of chlorine and with his eyes closed he can almost imagine that his dick is wet with blood instead of saliva, that Dean’s tear tracks run red. Sam splays a hand against the base of his throat, before thrusting so deep that Dean feels certain it must be visible from where he stands, watching like Dean’s body is laid at his alter. 

“Gonna come,” he manages, barely a warning as he fists his hand in Dean’s hair and stills completely. Dean is still picturing a crime scene when the first ribbon hits the back of his throat. Sam moans as he pulls out, rubbing the head of his cock over Dean’s parted lips. 

“I know you wanna try, Dean,” he says, a bit breathless as he watches Dean franticly strip his hand over his own cock. “You wanna put those anatomy books to good use. See what a real human looks like inside.” 

Dean’s forehead is pressed to Sam’s thigh when he comes, hunched over as his eyes roll shut. It takes a moment to pull himself away from the fringes of their shared little fantasy, but when he does it’s to Sam dragging him to his feet, kissing him soft and licking apologetically at the swollen edges of his lips. 

“Did I go too hard?” He asks, nudging his nose against his jawbone.

“No,” he says, his voice a bit rough but no worse for wear. 

“You know this is your decision, right?” Sam tucks his hair behind his ear, his only tell. “I just like talking you off.” 

“I know, Sammy.” He kisses him once, his hand laid across the steady thrum of his pulse. 

“You’ll come with me,” Sam repeats, turning into his touch. “No matter what you do.”

“Course I will.” They seal it with a kiss.

—

She’s seaside born in Delaware, raised on boardwalk fries and seasonal tourists in lake houses. She seems a bit too buttoned up and private school perky to be anywhere near a half decent hunter but her hands are steady against her glass and those eyes hold just as firm. He wonders what a beach girl is doing hunting monsters, though he doubts she’ll ever tell. 

She shifts in her acid wash jeans, a throwback to Dean’s high school days, before she finally speaks. “These are my stomping grounds. The DMV all the way to Pennsylvania. You’ve been hunting my game.”

Dean takes a sip of cheap whisky, considering the backs of her hands. They have scars enough to match his own. “Didn’t know hunters had beats these days.” 

She grits her teeth and Dean smirks in the way that usually gets him fluttering lashes and teenaged sighs. “Listen, I won’t stand for this psychopath shit down here. I don’t care what it is you’re hunting, if you’re taking bodies apart for fun then there’s something seriously wrong with you.” 

It’s not for fun, not really. Dean thinks it’s closer to sacrifice. He squares his shoulders and leans forward, letting some of Sammy’s smile slip through. “What is it you want us to do?” 

“Stay the fuck away,” she says. 

“I don’t think so, kiddo. We have a home base now, and unfortunately there’s some overlap between our highways.” 

“I’m not the only one you’ll have to deal with.” It sounds like a threat. 

“Then we’ll deal with them too.” He says. “Unless you want to join us, learn a little something.”

“You’re disgusting,” she snaps, a last ditch attempt to regain her higher ground but Dean is laughing, tipping his head back before snatching her wrist and holding tight even as she tries to pull away. 

“Maybe,” he says. “But it’s just monsters, you know. We’re not hurting humans.” 

“Not yet.” She wrenches her hand away and straightens her jacket with a self-conscious tug at the cuff of her sleeve. 

“You know,” she begins, leaning close enough for Dean to smell a whiff of cherry blossom shampoo. “I asked around. Two hunters, distinct as you, stuck to the east coast, hunting big game. My contact in Cumberland found a mugshot, sent it my way.” She lets it linger. “He says you’re brothers.”

“Dean Winchester,” he says in mock introduction. “Unfortunately I left Sam back at the motel.” 

She watches him closely, a flicker of washed out blue. “You’re disgusting,” she whispers a second time, almost too soft to be heard over the music. She turns away with a flick of her auburn hair.

“I hear Delaware is lovely in the spring,” he calls after her, watching as the door swings shut. 

—

“Well?” Sam sits with his back to the headboard, wearing flannel sweats and nothing else. His laptop casts electric blue in the otherwise dark room. 

“She told us to get the fuck out of the east coast, basically.” Dean flips on a lamp and tugs at his boots. “And she’s done her research, knows we’re brothers.”

Sam doesn’t look away from the screen as he curls his tongue around his teeth, smiling like he’s done something to be proud of. “Who told her?”

“She mentioned some hunter down in Cumberland. Think it could be Rick?”

Sam shrugs as his fingers flitter over the keyboard. “Last I heard he was near Baltimore, so probably. Did you get the girl’s name?”

“Of course not.” Dean stretches out against the comforter, listening to the crackles and pops of his aching body. He is too young for his bones to rebel like this. “Though I did get her license plate number.” 

Sam hums in approval as he raises an absentminded hand to the back of Dean’s neck and begins to rub out the tension before moving down the slopes of his shoulders. “A little to the left,” Dean murmurs, adjusting his position and pushing back into Sam’s fingers. 

“Turn around,” he says, gently rolling him over for better access. “Take your shirt off, we’ll do this properly.” 

“Do I get a happy ending?” He asks, once he’s belly down with his face pressed against the mattress. 

“Could fuck you,” Sam offers, turning the heel of his palm against his spine, gliding down the length of his lower back.

“No thanks,” Dean says into the pillow. Sam’s fingers find the gaps between his ribs, rubbing upwards and out, forcing soft sounds from his lungs. 

He shifts for a moment, climbing off the bed, and returns with a bottle of conditioner and an apologetic, “You’ll have to clean up afterwards, but we don’t have any lotion and we’re not wasting lube.” 

Sam climbs back onto the bed, straddling his hips, the obvious bulge in his sweats grinding back against Dean’s ass. “What did I say about the fucking?”

“You never said not to get hard,” Sam points out. He’s running gooey trails of motel conditioner up along his shoulder blades, pressing in and digging deep. He braces one hand on Dean’s lower back, holding his weight against the base of his spine as his thumb follows the ridges of his shoulder. It feels distantly familiar, Sam’s little tricks to loosen adrenaline-tense muscles, but his hands aren’t small and delicate anymore and he’s not just a wisp of a teenager against his back. 

Sam traces soothing little patterns into his skin as he rubs at a particularly painful knot. “Adjust your neck so I can - ,” He begins, though he is interrupted by polite but firm knocking. 

Dean presses up onto his elbows, turning to check that the latch on the door is in place. Sam ignores it and pushes him back down. He adjusts his neck for himself, kneading into the tops of his shoulders with Dean’s forehead pressed to the mattress. 

“You gonna get that?” He groans, as the knocking continues.

“He can wait,” Sam says. He braces his hands on the bed and dips low enough to trace his tongue along the length of Dean’s spine. He moans in approval and laughs when Sam immediately spits into a tissue. 

“Forgot about the cream rinse, huh?”

Sam follows his progress with his thumbs. “Yep.” He stops at the top of Dean’s worn Levi’s, pushing into the dimples in his lower back. “Lose the jeans and I’ll do your legs.”

“Pretty sure Night Gallery over there is still waiting.” 

“He can wait,” Sam repeats, soothing and low as he flips his brother over and draws his jeans down over his hips. He traces the outlines of his hipbones through his boxer briefs, before he’s reaching for the conditioner bottle again. 

“I’ll have to shower after this.” Everything is slick and wet and his skin reeks of floral perfume, but he moans as Sam works the tension loose from his calves. “Fuck.”

The knocking has turned into an occasional tapping reminder, but Sam hasn’t paid it any attention at all. Instead he’s taking his time above Dean’s left knee. He twisted it on a hunt when Sam was a sophomore in high school. He remembers being laid out in a little Christmas town in Michigan while Sam read out loud from Virgil’s Aeneid as he studied for his Latin advanced placement exam. 

“It still bothers you?” Sam asks, kneading gently at the top of his thigh, following the muscle down to meet his knee. 

“Only sometimes,” Dean admits. John was never patient and none of Dean’s injuries healed as well as they probably should have. Sam presses hard at his Achilles tendon, tracing up his calve, and kisses his knee when Dean gasps in protest. 

“Sorry,” he says, but Dean has already forgiven him as he hikes his leg up against his shoulder and pulls at every ache. Dean’s eyes close as Sam moves to the arches of his feet, pressing deep enough to make Dean moan.

He remembers how they would cure their mutual growing pains, fists against shoulders to beat out the knots, but it never felt quite like this. Sam follows the path of his outer thigh, grabbing deep like he’s reaching inside of him and God, Dean wishes he was. He thinks of the hunter, the girl who peaked through their keyhole, and he imagines her legs flayed open.

Sam leans down and bumps his cheek against Dean’s growing hard on. “Still someone at the door.” Dean’s voice slurs with sleep and dopamine, but Sam is already tugging at his boxers, pulling them down and licking at his cock as he continues to press into the tops of his thighs. 

Dean makes a soft sound of lazy approval as Sam rolls his tongue around the head, dripping saliva down his chin. He feels paralyzed, half asleep as Sam continues his careful exploration of his musculature with Dean’s cock held gently in his mouth. 

“Sammy,” he whines, and he can feel Sam smiling, kneading at the base of his ass with open palms. He starts to pick up the pace just as the knocking begins again, and Dean can’t help himself. He doesn’t move an inch, not even to thrust up into the warmth of his mouth. 

Sam paces everything down to the second. When a voice finally calls, “Shall I just come back another time?” he is already moving his hands to cup Dean’s balls and tease a damp fingertip into his hole. Dean doesn’t even have time to warn him before he’s coming down his throat. Time stutters and slows while Sam swallows around his softening cock, massaging absentmindedly at his legs as he relaxes back into the mattress.

Sam gets up and returns with a damp towel, rubbing the remains of sticky conditioner off of Dean’s body as he watches with half-lidded eyes. Once he’s passably clean, Sam pulls the sheets up over his chest, tucking him under the comforter in a parody of their childhood routine. 

“I’m gonna get the door,” he murmurs into his ear, kissing the soft dip of his lobe. 

Dean nods and watches as he reaches for the doorknob. Sam’s smile shifts to something harder to place, something so far away from their shared body heat as a plain twenty-something in hiking gear follows him into the room.

“Deano,” he says, nodding in Dean’s direction before taking a seat at the flimsy card table set up against the wall. Sam sits facing him on the foot of the bed, his back to Dean and his hand splayed over the shape of his shin beneath the blankets. “You two certainly took your sweet time.”

“We did,” Sam says agreeably and Andrew’s lips curl into a sneer. His vessel looks sweet and green and fresh off the Appalachian Trail. Dean closes his eyes, turning his nose into the pillow, breathing in the smell of his brother still clinging to the sheets.

“I’ve news on Lilith,” he says, his voice tight and scratchy. “I thought you’d be rather interested in what I had to say.”

“Andras,” Sam says in a smiling drawl. “You know I am.”

He huffs, sandy blonde lashes flickering in annoyance. “She accepts your proposal.” 

Sam is silent, but Dean can imagine the look in his eyes. “And should you have any plans to renege on your deal,” he continues. “She wants me to remind you that her position in hell is limited only by her ambition, and should you ever move against her, she will win.”

“Of that I have no doubt, but I appreciate her support. You know where you’ll go next?” Andrew hums in the affirmative. “Good.”

“I’ll let you know if any of them request your presence personally. They are, after all, earthbound.” 

Dean is one foot into deep sleep, but he can still catch the sound of Sam’s soft laughter. “We both know they won’t. You’ve done well, Andras.”

He dreams of little Sammy with a crown of cardboard, spray painted a sickly yellow with a heavenly glow. Someone is kneeling at his feet, a shadow of man hunched before Sam’s childlike fingertips. 

“Thank you, your majesty.” 

—

Dean takes apart another vampire in Pennsylvania. She has cloudy eyes and auburn hair and Sam stays extra quiet, like he knows better than to break the illusion. He pulls her teeth out early on, hiding them in a rag twisted bloody on the tarp. She looks more human after that, she sounds it too. His phone rings once the body is burned and they’re both covered in dried blood, their hands numb from the cold. Sam is sated and slumped in the passenger seat but Dean still feels strung high, like he’s waiting for the fall. 

“It’s Bobby,” Sam murmurs, rubbing at his eyes, his face lit by the whitewash of his little flip phone. “I’m putting him on speaker.”

“Hey Bobby,” Dean says. “We’re about ten minutes away from the West Virginia boarder, you’re on speaker, and you might wanna make it quick before our service goes.”

There’s careful silence from the other end, until finally Bobby says, “So you are hunting?” 

Sam hums his affirmative as Dean answers with a quick, “Off and on.”

“Haven’t looked into any schools, Sam?”

Sam laughs, soft and quiet from where his head rests against the window, his hair fallen over his eyes. “A bit too soon for that I think. Manhunt’s not quite over.”

Bobby snorts and scoffs and he sounds like himself for just a moment. “You think I’ve been sitting idle? Last known sighting of Sam Wesson and Dean Winchester was down by Mexico City and rumors put them in Nogales. They say it’s cartel connections.”

Dean laughs aloud at that. “You’ve been doing good, Bobby.”

“But it’s not quite safe enough for my liking,” Sam adds. “We’re lying low.” 

Bobby sighs and mutters obscenities under his breath, finishing off with, “Well you can’t say I didn’t try.”

“Why’d you really call, Bobby?” 

He hesitates and Sam sits up in his seat, pushing his hair out of his face, watching Dean with lamplit eyes. 

“No reason, really,” Bobby says. “Just checking in. Was hoping you’d tell me you boys have been working mechanic jobs and sleepin’ too late.” 

“Afraid not,” Dean says. “Sorry, Bobby.”

“Yeah, well.” He peters off into mountain static. 

“Think we’re gonna lose you soon. We’re hitting wilderness now.” All of Pennsylvania seems like wilderness until you pass into the heights of West Virginia and the dark gets darker. 

“Keep in touch,” he says, hanging up before Sam and Dean can call out their assurances. Sam reaches out, his fingers scrubbing at a patch of blood dried thick across the edge of his throat. 

“He didn’t expect me to be here,” he says and Dean nods his agreement. Sam’s fingers slip around to the back of his neck, combing carefully through the short ends of Dean’s hair. 

“I think that girl might be louder than we thought,” Dean murmurs. 

“Maybe not,” he says. “If she is confiding in Rick, the first thing he’d do is call Bobby. Could just be a coincidence.” Sam’s fingers are hypnotic against his skin.

“Should we stop? It’s late.” Sam says, changing the subject with a glance at the digital numbers lit across his cellphone. 

“No,” Dean says. “It’s only four hours. You go to sleep, I’ll wake you when we’re home.” It feels novel to say without referring to a motel room or a temporary base treated like military barracks, sparse and spartan. For the first time Dean pictures their bedroom, the careless throw of their sheets, and he drives on.

“Home,” Sam repeats, like he knows what he’s thinking. His head is already resting back against the glass and Dean watches him out of the corner of his eye, a stolen glance before they lose the highway lights altogether.

“Go to sleep, Sammy.” 

They arrive in Nitro an hour before sunrise. Fog lies heavy and Dean takes the hills slow, waking Sam every time he shifts gears. He eventually gives up on sleep and rubs his eyes and breathes deep, readjusting himself and finding his bearings. 

“Nitro?” He asks, stretching his shoulders back. Dean manages a soft affirmative before his phone interrupts him with the rapid fire buzzing of a text message. 

“It’s Bobby,” Sam says, reaching for it. “He wants to talk to you. Alone.”

“Looks like you were right.” Dean adjusts his grip on the steering wheel. Sometimes he’s surprised that his fingers aren’t already imprinted in the leather.

“You should call him when we get home.” 

“What should I say?” 

“Whatever you want, Dean.” Sam reaches out for him, squeezing his thigh. “I’ll back you. This goes however you want to play it.”

He wonders why it is that he dreams of vivisection but the thought of Bobby’s disappointment sends his stomach turning. 

“You love him,” Sam answers for him. “We both do. They don’t cancel each other out.”

“Not yet,” Dean says. 

“Lie,” Sam decides for him, shifting across the seat until he can press a dry kiss to the side of Dean’s neck. “Say we’ve been hearing the same rumor, only it was just one hunter, not a set. Tell him that we met a girl in Delaware who claimed to have seen him butchering his way through Virginia. Tell him I’m gunning to look into it, to hunt him down, but you’re not sure if it’s a good idea.” 

“Okay,” he says, hoping he can lie half as easily as Sam makes it sound. “I can do that.” 

The roads are still icy and slick and when they finally get home the house is frigid from six days without space heaters or the pellet stove running. Sam is warm enough for them both, stripping down out of his clothes and slipping between the sheets. He wraps his arms around him, spooning him close like a first-time girlfriend. 

Dean falls asleep easily and he wakes hours later to a blue winter sky and the familiar chime of a text message from one of the spare cellphones left charging along the power strip just beneath their bed. 

“It’s Bobby again,” Sam murmurs into his ear. “You gonna answer this time?”

He leaves the warmth of Sam’s body heat for a breath or two of frigid air, crawling under the bed and pawing around for the right phone. Bobby’s message reads ‘Call me,’ and nothing else. Dean settles back into Sam’s side, pulling the comforter up to their chins as Sam buries his face in the warmth of his neck. He sets the volume on the receiver as loud as it will go and makes the call. 

“Bobby,” he says, his voice rough from the mid-afternoon chill. Sam’s hair tickles the base of his throat and Dean presses his lips to the crown of his head, waiting for Bobby to answer.

“Dean,” he says, slow and careful. “Where’re you at?” 

“Front porch,” he lies. “Sammy’s still asleep. It was a long drive.” 

“Good,” Bobby murmurs. “Good. Listen, boy. I’ve been hearing things.”

Sam’s fingers lower to the waistband of his boxers, lingering at the elastic. “Yeah,” he says. “We’ve been hearing things too.”

“I’ll be straight. Heard from more than one hunter that Sam and Dean Winchester have taken to torturing vamps and ghouls in their free time.”

Dean laughs and Sam’s fingers slip lower. He’s already half hard to match his morning breath. “That’s not quite what I’ve been hearing. Sounds like some hunters are playing telephone.”

“Yeah?” Bobby doesn’t seem convinced.

Sam slowly cups his balls in one hand and begins sliding under the covers, shifting against the mattress. Dean can feel his breath against his navel and watches as the brother shaped bulge in the sheets drifts farther and farther down his body. Dean clears his throat just as Sam kisses the head of his cock, starting out slow and loving, like it’s a Sunday morning for them to sleep through. 

“We met a girl in Delaware, supposedly the source of this whole thing. Said it was just one man, a hunter no one could identify, working out of Virginia.” Sam takes him into his mouth like it’s a reward, swallowing down deep. Dean fucks up into his throat, his eyes rolled closed for just a moment, completely silent as he watches his brother’s head bob beneath the sheets. 

“But we’ve heard other stories, since then,” he continues, his voice steady. “Met a few hunters up in Ohio, said it was more than one man, that it was some kind of group. Like hunters gone rouge. It didn’t sound right to me, though.”

Sam swallows, contracting his throat around Dean’s cock and it sounds sloppy. A painful little noise vibrates through his vocal cords and Dean allows his free hand to snake down into Sam’s hair. He forces his head up, waiting until he hears Sam gasp for a few breaths, before he’s pushing him down again, tilting his hips up to meet his lips

Bobby sighs like it’s a relief. “You been spreading your names around, boy?” 

“We’re not exactly hiding it,” Dean admits. “Though Sam is more cautious. I don’t see the point. Like you said, hunters get mixed up with the law all the time.”

“Well, guess that’s a warning for you. The rumors are saying it’s you who’s taking things apart, Dean.”

Dean chuckles again as Sam begins tonguing at his balls, gagging and breathing heavy. Those sounds settle something in his chest and keep his ribs from rattling. “That’s alright, no harm done. Last rumor we heard was that it was a coven of witches carving up creatures for spell work.”

That gives Bobby pause, like he’s thinking it over. “That might not be too far off base.”

“Maybe not,” Dean says, setting a steady rhythm of shallow thrusts so that Sam has a chance to breathe under the stale air of the comforter. “But I’m inclined to believe the girl. Heard it from her first, after all, and hunter bars are as unreliable as they come.” 

“You’re probably right,” Bobby says. “Well I oughta let you go. Get back to bed, I reckon you need it.”

“Sure thing, Bobby. Thanks for checking in.” He ends the call and tosses his phone onto the bed. 

“Ready for me to come?” Dean asks, peaking under the comforter at his brother’s flushed cheeks and sweat damp hair. Sam doesn’t look away, just holds his gaze and takes him deeper.

—

Snow seems to fall in slow motion in Nitro, lazy and last minute and like most things in the mountains, still a bit wet. They spend the entire day in bed. Snow quickly shifts to ice and the wet cold seeps deep through every crack and crevice until only their shared body heat beneath old knit afghans is enough to keep it at bay. Dean is awake as the sun sets, gently running his fingers over every plane of Sam’s skin. He knows he must be awake as well, though he keeps his eyes closed and his breathing even. 

He thinks about summers spent in motel rooms and how they would lay with inches between them to stave off the heat as they scratched little drawings into each other’s skin. They would keep their hands pressed over their eyes as they guessed what the other was tracing. Sam would frequently accuse him of just drawing nonsense in an attempt to sabotage their game. Usually it was the outline of distant mountain tops or a cicada or Sam’s little tennis shoes. They would both laugh and laugh, drawing their invisible pictures until one of them finally fell asleep. It was usually Sam, lulled by the soft touch of Dean’s fingertips. 

“Waves,” Sam says, his voice scratchy with sleep, his eyes closed. “The ocean.”

Dean had been tracing his brother’s silhouette onto his shoulder blade. “Not quite,” he says.

Sam pauses. “A Christmas tree.”

Dean laughs into his skin, rolling him over to press a kiss to his closed lips. “Go back to sleep.”

“Come with me,” Sam says. “And I will.”

“Yeah, okay. I’ll be right there.” Sometimes Dean wishes he could.

—

Dean gets used to the lingering smell of sulphur. It seems to spread through the water like an early warning sign. The shower will run hot and then scalding for a fraction of a second before it sets in. He usually lingers on those days, breathing in the smell of ruptured gas lines, forever wired directly into his pulse to send his heart racing. He keeps the water running as hot as he can stand it until the heater finally goes. Nitro suffers from the shallow boilers that plague motel strips across the country, but Dean never did mind it lukewarm. 

Sometimes he wakes at night to an empty bed. His instincts are torn between five years of single hotel rooms and a childhood of little Sammy stealing the sheets. He knows to stay put, despite whatever direction his nerves take him each night. Sam will be back in bed before he wakes again and the sulphuric residue will be swept up from the front steps. 

Most of the time, he doesn’t even think about it. But he can always smell it in the forest, where the bite of sulphur is so out of place among the old oaks and maple trees. 

“How well do you know these woods by now?” His vessel is the same bright-eyed treehugger that he’d worn in North Carolina. He fits right in among the high pines of the Alleghenies, though he’s dressed in a fall fleece with a little rainproof wax coat. It wouldn’t be enough for a human, not up here in the frosty grips of February. 

“Pretty well,” Dean answers, continuing on down his self-made trail. 

Andrew hums and follows along after him, running his fingers up and down the bark of birch trees as he walks. 

“Sam doesn’t like you hanging around me anymore. What do you want?”

“Nothing,” he says, playing both hurt and sincere. “I’m just waiting on some intel, enjoying my downtime. I figured I’d check in on my favorite human.”

“Sounds to me like you’re cheating on my brother.”

“I said human,” Andrew says with a leer, like he had it locked and loaded and all he needed was for Dean to give the signal. 

“He doesn’t want you hanging around,” Dean repeats. “So why are you here?”

“You know,” Andrew begins, stepping around upturned roots and following Dean’s stride. “I think it’s sweet that you both spent so many years avoiding each other.”

“I didn’t avoid him,” Dean says. “He was in school.”

“You avoided him.” He grins. “You were afraid you’d gone too dark for that sweet little boy. And Deano, let me tell you, Sam was worried about exactly the same thing. Only difference is that you fucked boys unconscious in an attempt to handle it and Sam dreamt of bloodshed each night.”

“I’m headed back,” Dean tells him. “Sam won’t be happy if you’re with me.”

“No,” Andrew agrees. “But he needs to get used to the idea.”

“Of you following me through the woods?” He asks, eyebrows raised.

“Of his brother slumming it.” 

He grits his teeth and tries not to think of the demon deals Sam makes at night when Dean is not awake to hear the terms. He tries to picture hell sometimes, when he’s walking between the gaps of fallen trees, over oak leaves iced together into cracked mosaics. He doesn’t remember much about Dante’s circles, but something tells him it’s not too far off. 

“He trusts me,” Dean says, picking up his pace as the trail slopes down towards the valley.

“I never said he didn’t. But Sam is going to be king, Deano, and what do you think that’ll make you?”

Dean waves, a single handed gesture. “Deputy.” 

— 

Sam tends to wrap himself around Dean like a noose in the morning, especially when the windows are still fogged up and iced over. He runs his nose up and down the back of his ear, exhaling warmth against his skin. “You know I would never force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

Dean was still half asleep, dreaming of nothing at all, but his eyes flutter open at the sound of Sam’s voice. He nods blearily, tightening his hold on his brother’s arm. 

“That girl, the hunter. I have her name and her address. We don’t have to do anything with it. But I wanted you to know that we can.” He pulls back, settling against his own pillow, as if he’s giving Dean the space to think.

It’s been a few lazy weeks since they’ve been out on a hunt and suddenly he feels every minute in the tingling of his fingertips. Sam is occupied with his secrets, but Dean spends his days in the forest, stamping out the smell of sulphur with frigid mountain air. He turns over to face him, watching as Sam’s eyes flicker up to meet his. 

“How about now?” He asks, as Sam’s fingers press bruises into his hips. “Is it a sure thing now?”

He half expects Sam to repeat himself, to assure him that nothing is certain, just like he did in that little North Carolina diner. Instead, he smiles and says, “As sure as we want it to be.”

“And it’ll all - it’ll all just wait until we’re dust?”

Sam leans forward to kiss him, gentle and tacky, just a press of his lips. “Until we’re old and grey, if that’s what you want.”

Dean has never really thought of growing old. He breathes in deep and says, “I want to take her apart for you.”

Sam has him on his back in an instant, pinning his hands at his sides and kissing him, open mouthed and frantic. “Yes,” he pants into his mouth. “And when she’s dead, when we’re all alone, I’m going to fuck you. Deal?”

Dean’s eyes flutter up to see his brother’s pupils stretched wide. “Deal,” he whispers. 

—

Dean calls Bobby’s landline. It’s a number he knows by heart, the one that’s reserved for personal calls. It hardly ever rings and he always answers right away. 

“Long time no see,” he growls into the receiver. 

“Heya, Bobby. How’s it going?” Dean sits back against the hard plastic siding. The ground hasn’t yet begun to thaw and he pulls idly at the dead grass, letting his fingernails fill with grit and dirt. 

“Well, it’s going.” Bobby’s voice is mountain static. “I guess you’re still hunting.”

“Yeah,” Dean admits. His breath no longer turns to clouds in the crisp air, and he thinks spring might be coming any day now. “We took a break, for a while. Sam’s been buried in textbooks, boring law stuff, you know? He says he doesn’t want to fall too far behind.”

Bobby hums. “Well that’s a good sign.”

“I thought you’d say that. We’re probably going to find something this weekend though.” Dean closes his eyes and tilts his head back, forcing himself to listen to the distant sounds of Bobby shifting and settling in his chair. He hears another phone line ring and Bobby’s gruff, “Hold on.” 

It sounds like an agency call. Bobby murmurs a fake name in the background and follows it up with a bark of, “What kind of backwater town doesn’t even run badge numbers? You just wasted my time checking up on one of my agents.” He pauses for a moment and Dean smiles despite himself. “Well don’t bother running it now, just let my man do his job.”

He hangs up with a heavy hand and returns to Dean with a much friendlier, “Need help looking?” 

“Nah, we think we found something down near Charlotte.” 

“Something?” Bobby echoes. 

“Two children missing from a townhouse, their bedroom found covered in handprints made of soot.” Sam had brought home the police records the day before, laying them out along the kitchen table without a word of comment. 

“Well,” he murmurs, opening a beer. “Good luck with that one.”

Dean laughs, deep in his throat. “Sam already has his theories.”

“I’ll bet. So you boys taking care of yourselves out there in the mountains?” He sounds just the slightest bit uncomfortable. It’s that fragile note to his voice that gives him away, the one he used to have when he’d call them in from the backyard and tell them to wash their hands for dinner. The note that said he never quite settled into the role of being a parent. 

“Yeah. Better than usual, really. Three square meals a day, sleeping through the night.” 

“You? Or just Sam?”

Dean hums, digging his fingers deeper into the earth. “Both of us. Sam’s whipped me into shape.”

“Good,” he says. “That’s real good, Dean. I’m happy for you boys.”

“Thanks, Bobby.” 

They’re both silent for a moment and Dean hears wind and rustling grass and Bobby’s distant breathing. 

“Well,” he says, eventually. “I’ll let you go. You keep in touch, boy.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I will.” 

He tosses the phone away from him the second the dial tone sings and opens his eyes, looking up towards the clear sky. There’s not a cloud in sight and it looks so different from the haze and fog of summer. Nitro lights up in the wintertime and Dean thinks he’ll miss it when the heat sets in. The screen door clatters in the front, and he looks up just as Sam turns the corner. 

“Hey,” he says, his voice low. He settles at Dean’s side, his bare feet tucked under his calves. Dean loops an arm around his waist, snaking his hand beneath his henley and running his fingers absentmindedly up and down his ribcage. Sam doesn’t say anything else. 

They stay outside until the wind picks up and the chill sets in, turning their fingers red and their feet numb. The sun disappears behind the trees, painting the sky yellow and orange with none of the beauty of a midwestern sunset. 

“C’mon, Sammy,” he says, breathing into his hair. 

Sam’s head is nestled against his shoulder and he can feel the gentle brush of his eyelashes batting open. He sits up, his hair mussed and the tip of his nose bright with cold. “We’re going in?”

“Yeah.” He pushes himself to his feet, ignoring the stiffness in his legs and lower back. He aches like an old man most days, filled with cracks that never quite healed. Dean reaches down and pulls Sam up after him, watching how his toes curl into the dead grass. 

Sam keeps a hold of his hand and follows him out of the cold.


	6. Chapter 6

Sam looks years older, with his wind swept hair falling into his eyes and the heavy cut of his jaw bone. He’s packed on muscle like he’s seventeen again and running laps as punishment. He takes up so much space already that Dean is surprised there’s anywhere left for him to grow. 

“Maybe you do need a trim,” Dean says as Sam shrugs off his coat and leaves it draped over the remains of an old kitchen cabinet. “I’m surprised you can see a thing.”

“I can see just fine,” he says. His footsteps crackle and crunch as he walks across the tarp laid out over the linoleum floor. 

Dean’s body is alive with nervous energy. His fingers tap a restless rhythm against his leg until Sam reaches for his hand. Everything about him is steady and Dean allows his eyes to close as Sam pulls him close and whispers, “There’s always time.”

“No,” he sighs. “I’m ready. I am.”

“You’re nervous,” Sam says.

“Yeah.” Dean was probably always going to hell, but he never thought he’d be able to pick the exact moment out of the lineup of his life choices. “Can you grab the space heaters from the car?”

Sam presses a paper chaste kiss to his cheek and nods his head. Dean looks out across the skeleton of the house where he took a skin walker apart in front of an unwanted audience. It’s a bit of satisfying symmetry, drawn by Sam’s hand after a few careful weeks of planning. He’s almost surprised at how clean it looks, like there was never blood dripping from the drywall. 

“Here,” Sam says, setting the space heaters down on either side of the metal folding chair they’d brought with them from Nitro. “We should turn them on now, give this place some time to warm up.”

He flips them on without waiting for a reply and Dean listens to the metallic hum of electricity. 

“How do you want me to do it?” Sam asks, still kneeling on the floor, his hands spread out in front of the space heater. His cheeks are flushed from the cold, but the rest of him glows an artificial red beneath the light.

“You can get her here without drugs?” He asks.

Sam smiles. “Just by asking.” 

“Then do it,” he says, and Sam kisses him a chaste goodbye.

Dean waits in the folding chair, sitting back and staring at the door. Zip ties are already laid out next to the metal legs and he doesn’t plan on needing much else to keep her still. He tries to tilt the chair back, forgetting for a moment that it’s attached firmly to the ground, and he smiles to himself as his foot slides against the tarp.

He’s spent the last hour imagining what will happen when Sam finally walks through that door. In most of his last-minute daydreams, he’s carrying her body, limp but not unconscious. Dean always smiles as he meets her eyes, open wide with paralysis. Occasionally, he imagines Sam walking her through the door like a five-cent kidnapper, his gun held steady to the base of her spine. 

But when Sam finally does push the door open, he’s alone. 

“Sammy?” He asks, standing. 

Sam only smiles, a slight reassuring thing. He steps inside, toes off his shoes, and behind him is the girl from Delaware, dressed in sweatpants with her hair pulled thoughtlessly into a bun, her arms bare. Her gaze is empty like she’s standing in a Witching Hour double feature. For a moment, Dean feels the long-forgotten creep of goose bumps along his skin.

“Sit,” Sam says, his voice distant and unfamiliar.

She takes a seat in the folding chair with her sock covered feet settled flat against the tarp. She doesn’t shift or pull away as Dean tightens the zip ties around her ankles. He glances up at Sam with a curious tilt to his head. 

“Come here,” he says. 

Sam kisses him, open mouthed and sloppy. He wraps his arm tight against Dean’s lower back, forcing him onto his toes. After a breath or two, Sam pulls back but keeps Dean flush against his chest, running a cold finger up and down the apple of his cheek. His eyes are bright with an unnatural gild and Dean doesn’t look away. 

He sets his hands on Dean’s shoulders, kneading deep, before he turns him back towards the chair and gives him a gentle push forward. “Go play.” 

Sam snaps his fingers, the sound echoing through the silent house, and all at once Dean watches as her eyes widen and her chest heaves with panic.

“What the fuck,” she gasps, trying to push herself to her feet. The zip ties keep her feet steady, but she immediately reaches for her ankles, pulling at the plastic. He could’ve cuffed her hands, but Dean doesn’t want anything in the way of her torso. 

“Sam,” he says, without looking back. 

He can hear him hum in response and in seconds she’s flat against the back of the chair, forced into a piano player’s posture as her breathing grows louder. 

She struggles for a moment, as if in disbelief. “What the fuck did you do to me?”

Sam doesn’t answer and Dean can hear him settle into the chair by the door, his usual box-seat to Dean’s performances. Her eyes dart around the house, a hunter’s routine of identifying exits and a means of escape. She sees the black tool case left open on the remains of the fomica countertop and she begins to struggle again.

“You can’t do this,” she says, her teeth bared against the panic in her voice. “I’m well connected and they’ll find me. They’ll come looking.”

“Probably,” Dean agrees, running his fingers along the handles of his blades. He picks out a set of scissors thick enough to cut through cloth and a straight-edged paring knife. “But they won’t start looking until tomorrow.”

“That’s not true,” she says immediately. “It’s not. Madison, down in Virginia, he’s arriving tonight.”

Dean kneels in front of her and takes the scissors to her t-shirt. 

“What the fuck-” she shouts, trying to pull away. She’s thin and bony and her veins are visible like webs of blue paint beneath her pale skin.

“Madison, huh?” Dean asks, settling the scissors aside. “What kind of business would a werewolf hunter have around here?”

“He’s headed up to New Hampshire for a hunt.” Her voice is shaking now, like the fear has finally set in. “He’s spending the night at my place instead of a motel. He’ll be there any minute and if I’m gone, he’ll start looking.”

Dean hums. “Virginia ain’t far. Seems silly to stop for the night, especially if you’re running against a full moon.”

“He’s coming fresh off a hunt in Alabama,” she spits. “And hunters always stop by my place. They know it’s safe and they’re always welcome.”

Dean steadies his arm on her knee. “Maybe you chose the wrong career path. You could be running a hunter’s bed and breakfast, from the sounds of it. I bet if you had, you wouldn’t be here right now.”

Dean feels something exquisite with the first cut of his knife, something like guilt that makes the adrenaline run hotter, flooding his eardrums with the sound of blood pumping just as she screams for him to stop. For so long his ears were tuned to that sound as he rescued families from crumbling houses throughout every state in the damn country. He turns and meets Sam’s gaze, black and gold, and his hands start to shake. 

Sam mouths his name through bitten lips, followed by a sighed, “So beautiful, you’re so beautiful.” 

He turns his attention back to his knife and makes another cut down her sternum as she screams through gritted teeth. Her pupils begin to dilate into discs of black over the hazy blue of her eyes and Dean knows that this will be quick. He can likely work through three pints of blood and keep her conscious, but shock is a tricky thing. Her blood is already drying tacky and thin, so he wipes his palms on his jeans and reaches for his carving knife. He stands in front of her, mapping out his next move, hoping in an idle kind of way that the batteries in the heaters hold. If the temperature drops, her blood pressure will fall quicker than Dean can carve her.

“Wait,” she gasps. “Wait, wait - you don’t need to. I’m not going to - ”

“Oh you already blabbed, sweetheart,” Dean says, tracing a neat line from the base of her ear to the top of her chest. She screams loud enough for Dean to press a hand to her throat, holding her steady and quiet as he finishes off his design. “But that’s not why you’re here.”

He talks while he works, though he knows she doesn’t hear a word of it. Her body convulses with every touch of his knife and they’re both slick with blood and unrecognizable, so as her voice grows hoarse, he speaks for Sam. 

“You see, I’ve gotta get to hell and what better way than good old fashioned murder? And the rest - ” He continues as he slices along the open edge of her ribs. “Is because my little brother has been waiting patiently for me to take apart a human. Now I can’t properly cut you down, because it wouldn’t take more than a finger to knock you right out. But I can still carve.” 

Tear tracks are streaked along her skin and she struggles still, even weak with blood loss and fear. Her fingers are hooked under the seat of the chair, trying hard to pull herself from Sam’s invisible hold. Dean watches her, and thinks she was probably a good damn hunter. Finally she starts to scream again like she’s hoping someone might hear her. Dean fits his hand snug against her throat, cutting off her oxygen. She chokes, coughing through thick saliva, and Dean sits back as she fights to steady her breathing. 

“I’ll come back,” she says, finally. Wisps of blood streaked hair fall into her eyes, but she doesn’t look away. “I will haunt this whole fucking lot until a hunter comes to burn it down. And then I’ll make sure they know your names. I’ll make sure they know everything.”

“We burn our bodies,” he says absentmindedly.

Her breathing is shallow and her hands have gone slack. “You and I both know that doesn’t always do the trick.” 

Dean steps back, eyeing the symmetry of his fractured design. He carved along each blue marked vein like a textbook diagram of the circulatory system. He traced his fingers over so many anatomy drawings that it was more from memory than the guidelines under her pale skin. There’s one part missing, the cherry center of her heart, and so he sets his palm back over her mouth and starts to carve. 

He doesn’t truly notice when she falls limp, when her muffled screams no longer vibrate through the gaps of his fingers. He’s nearly finished flaying the skin where her heart would be, where it beats in a fading rhythm beneath muscle and bone, when Sam finally speaks.

“Dean,” he murmurs, pushing himself out of his chair. 

He looks up just as his brother tugs his shirt up over his head and unlaces his belt, the heavy metallic sound echoes against the crumbling drywall. Sam pulls him to his feet and presses his lips to Dean’s blood covered palm before taking two fingers in his mouth, his tongue playing along the webbing.

Dean knows she’s still breathing, a distant reminder that his job isn’t finished yet. Sam tugs his jeans down to his thighs and makes an absentminded gesture with one hand. Her neck breaks with an audible snap and Sam smiles at him through bloodied teeth. 

“I’m not waiting for a bed,” he whispers against Dean’s lips. “We’re doing this now.”

Dean wouldn’t ever deny his brother. He lifts his hips in invitation as Sam’s fingers scramble for his belt buckle. “Whatever you want,” he breathes.

“Do you trust me?” Sam asks, pulling off Dean’s boots and letting them hit the floor, sliding into pooled blood. He runs Dean’s abandoned paring knife up the seam of his shirt, cutting through thread and sending buttons flying. 

“Don’t be an idiot.” 

Sam smiles as he guides Dean’s arms up above his head. He holda his wrists tight for a moment before letting go. 

“Try to move,” he murmurs into his ear, grinding down into Dean’s erection. Dean tries to lift his hands but finds them pinned by some invisible weight. Sam snaps his fingers and Dean’s legs open of their own accord, a slow, steady drag across the tarp. 

“Jesus,” he whispers.

“Her name was Chloe.” Sam says it slowly, like he’s savoring every letter. “If you need me to let go, just say her name.”

Dean laughs, a little breathy from Sam’s hands pulling at his boxers. “You giving me a safe word?” 

Sam kisses him quiet, humming against his lips. “I’m being considerate.” 

Sam swallows his response as he feels his way across the floor for the bottle of lube they’d grabbed from their bedroom. He doesn’t open it though, instead he slips his fingers into his mouth before sliding his hand between Dean’s legs and gently rubbing at his hole. 

“Has anyone ever fucked you?” He asks. 

“No,” he admits, leaning forward to chase Sam’s lips. 

When he was young and Sam spent his nights tucked away in motel blankets, Dean was up for anything. Girls’ bodies were a marvel of soft skin and even softer sounds, and he spent most nights alternating between making them laugh and making them sigh his name. Boys were just as fun and twice as shy, and Dean would kiss them quiet and whisper into their spines. But with every new monster and each loaded salt round, Dean became more enamoured with bruised hipbones and the dirty, desperate sound of someone choking for air. So really, in a way, he just never got around to it. 

“Good, that’s so good,” Sam murmurs into his skin, like he already suspected it. “You’ve always been a bit of a slut, so I couldn’t be sure.” 

Dean snorts as Sam slicks up his fingers. The lube looks rusty and speckled from where it mixed with the dried blood on his hands, and his skin shines a slick red in the light of the space heaters. Dean feels sweat trickle down his temple and he shifts along the floor, pulling experimentally against the invisible hold on his wrists. 

“It won’t give,” Sam says, and without warning he slips a finger inside of him, knuckle deep. “No matter how much you tug at it.”

“God, Sam,” he breathes. 

“Get used to it quick.” He rolls his tongue over Dean’s nipple and blows gently on his skin. “Not gonna take my time.”

Dean’s eyes fall to Chloe’s body, slumped forward, but held upright on the chair by invisible puppet strings. It feels odd to know her name. He almost wishes Sam had never told him. 

Sam’s thumb traces the line of tension on his forehead, smoothing out his skin, as he slides in a second finger and whispers for him to relax. “It’s gonna hurt if you keep this up,” he huffs, leaning down to lick at the head of his cock. 

Dean forces himself to relax, to focus on the artists’ length of Sam’s fingers and the acrid smell of blood. The house has turned hot and muggy and the air sticks to his skin like Nitro summers and Dean’s sigh turns to a moan.

“You know,” Sam murmurs, pulling back for a moment. “You were the first man I’d ever been with who was cut.”

Dean laughs, despite himself, and Sam swallows down around him again as a third finger gently traces his rim. “Timing, man, c’mon.”

“Don’t worry.” He crooks his fingers just enough to make Dean’s shutter around him. “I couldn’t come unless I pictured them dead. Or dying. Either would do.” 

“Oh, Sammy, you’re so fucked up.” He’s beautiful, caked in blood and dust and he leans forward and pushes his fingers as far as they will go.

“Pot,” Sam murmurs into his ear. “Kettle. I know how much you love your hand around my throat.” 

Dean smiles because he won’t even try to deny it and finally Sam pulls his fingers free. He coats himself in lube from one hand and blood from the other, scooped out of a congealed pool that settled into the dips and hollows of the tarp. Dean makes an involuntary sound at the sight of him, and Sam smiles like a debate club know-it-all. 

“You ready?” He doesn’t even wait a breath for Dean’s reply. Instead, he’s pushing into him at a steady, drill-sergeant’s pace. It hurts, a sharp burn of sensation every time he inhales, and Sam leans down to kiss at the tears from his eyes. 

He pauses for just a moment, their hips flushed together, and Dean can’t breathe but for his brother buried chest-deep inside of him. He uses what little air he has left to whisper Sam’s name. 

“Dean,” he groans in return. Sweat drips from the ends of his hair as his hand clutches tight to the back of Dean’s neck, his thumb resting just behind his ear. He rubs gently at the sensitive skin there, a starkly sweet gesture, before he snaps his hips and grinds deep.

“God,” he mouths, his voice stuck somewhere deep in his throat. Sam pulls out slow enough that Dean feels every inch, and thrusts back in with the same measured violence he uses to hunt. He still feels the burn, the sharp echo of pain, but it’s soon replaced with something far more overwhelming. His fingernails dig deep into Dean’s hip as he presses himself up onto one hand, and he almost wishes Sam would make him bleed. 

Sam usually makes such sweet noises when he gets fucked, but now his brother is silent. He rolls his hips with an easy grace and Dean allows himself a moment to wonder what exactly he got up to in college. The moment passes as Sam angles himself just right and he’s moaning his name through bitten lips. “Jesus, Sammy, Jesus Christ.” 

Sam presses his hands into the ground and settles in, fucking him hard and fast until Dean’s eyes roll closed. “Was starting to think I wouldn’t find it,” Sam pants, a little crooked smile splayed across his lips.

“Don’t move,” Dean pleads. He’s straining hard at the bonds on his wrists when suddenly they break free. He jolts a little at the unexpected lack of pressure, but Sam is reaching up without breaking stride, entwining their fingers above his head.

“One day,” Sam murmurs, his head bent as sweat drips a steady pattern onto Dean’s stomach. “I’m gonna fuck you with a cock ring on.” He pauses for a moment, grinding his hips with a rent-boy rhythm. “I’ll fuck you until I come and ride you until I’m ready to do it again.”

He can see it like it’s happening already, played on a loop in the reflection of Sam’s irises. “Do you want that?”

Dean can’t nod, he can’t do anything but tighten his grip on his brother’s hands. His vision starts to go yellow at the edges, blurred out until all he can focus on is the steady drag of Sam inside of him and the electric rush of sensitivity. It almost feels like he’s being hollowed out, carved into something unrecognizable as Sam pushes little gasps of sound from his lips.

“When it’s ours, when hell’s ours, we’ll have all the time in the world. We can fit inside each other in ways you can’t even imagine.” He lowers himself down on one arm and brings their hips flush together. They kiss, wet and slow, and he turns gentle to match until it’s almost like love making. 

He rests their foreheads together as Dean’s neck strains against the floor. “I’m going to bite you until it draws blood, and you’re gonna come for me.” 

Sam’s teeth sinks into the arch of his neck and Dean is silent when he comes. Sam moans into his skin, his lips matted red with blood, and whispers his name with reverence that Dean isn’t sure he deserves. His hips shudder to a halt and Dean’s chest heaves as he fights to breathe through the haze of humidity. It feels like Sam has fucked the air from his lungs without ever raising a hand to his throat. 

Dean opens his eyes with a wince as Sam licks at the bite on his neck with the flat of his tongue. “It’s not so bad,” he murmurs.

“Stings a bit,” Dean corrects him, his voice ragged.

Sam laughs and Dean feels it deep, echoed through the sweat soaked skin of his chest. “I knew you could handle it.”

Dean smiles into his hair, and for a brief, breathless moment, he pretends that they could stay like this forever. 

“We can, you know,” Sam whispers to him, like it’s a secret to be kept from the body in the corner. “Soon.”

A chill creeps up his spine, despite the heat between them, and Dean nods his head. He inhales deep, a final, settling rattle to his breathing, and murmurs into Sam’s skin. “The second we’re home, I’m gonna choke you until you come, and hold you there until you black out.”

“Mm,” Sam hums, rolling his hips. “Then we better get moving.”

—

Dean smells blood for days. It sticks with him like sulphur, through lengthy showers and the start of spring rain. Sam says he doesn’t smell anything at all, but Dean’s not sure he believes him. He chews at his thumb nail and tastes iron and salt, but he knows that, at least, is just in his head. 

“I wouldn’t mind it,” Sam murmurs, swooping down to press a somewhat exaggerated kiss to the side of his head.

“What?” Dean asks, staring down at his book and trying to pretend that he hasn’t read _Cat’s Cradle_ twice through already. 

“If you still smelled like blood.” 

Dean blindly turns a page. “And to think,” he says. “You spent most of your teenage years begging to be normal.” 

Sam sits down beside him on the couch, propping his feet up onto the coffee table and leaning into Dean’s shoulder. “What a waste of time that was.”

Dean doesn’t answer, because he’s not really sure what to say. He remembers Sam’s temper, what John used to call his ‘extended terrible two’s.’ When he hit the age of twelve, it became ‘growing pains’ and after that, he was just a teenager. Thinking back, Sam has always been angry, and maybe they both should have known better. 

“You know,” Sam says, a hand creeping along the waistband of Dean’s sweatpants. “How people over-compensate?”

Dean hums and sets his book aside. He wonders about that demon blood sometimes, dripped into his mouth at a year-old. Dean wishes he could remember what Sam was like as a newborn, if he would scream at night or settle in his crib. 

“You don’t have anything to compensate for,” he says, wiggling his eyebrows in a way that makes Sam’s eyes roll.

“That’s not what I mean.” Sam has a loose hold on his cock, moving slow and just a bit too dry. 

“Well, I’m listening,” he says, allowing his head to fall back as Sam’s lips rest against his throat.

“You know how sometimes, people try really hard to hate something, because they know deep down that it’s meant for them?” 

Dean has never doubted where Sam’s resentment for their father truly came from. “Like bigots that fuck teenage boys in bathroom stalls.”

Sam smiles, rewarding him by pushing his sweatpants down to his thighs. “Yeah,” Sam says, repositioning himself until his lips are a breath away from a blowjob. “Just like that.”

“You know, while we’re on the topic of your mental health, I think you’ve become a bit of a nympho.” 

Sam hums, running his tongue thoughtfully along his slit. “I’ve been trying to distract you,” he admits, staring up at Dean with big eyes like he’s not about to gag himself on his brother’s cock. 

“From what?” He’s tempted to hold Sam by the hair and fuck his mouth, but Dean knows better than to interrupt him. 

“Guilt,” Sam says. 

“I’m not guilty.” Dean just does his best not to think too much about it, but he can still smell the blood.

“Good,” Sam says. 

“Good,” he repeats, before reaching down and threading his fingers into Sam’s hair, pulling hard enough to make him gasp. “Now open up.”

—

Dean wakes to an empty bed and one of Sam’s wrist watches left balanced on the bedside table. Dean fumbles with it, struggling to find the right button to make it glow night-vision green. It’s still a few hours before sunrise, so he rolls over onto Sam’s pillow, determined to fall back asleep. He does a good job of it too, slowly drifting off to dreams of voices in the walls.

His eyes flicker open the second those voices start to get louder. He can hear someone just outside the front door, someone he doesn’t recognize, followed by a snapped command from Sam. Things go quiet for a moment, but Dean is already out of bed, tugging on a pair of sweatpants and the first t-shirt he can find.

He can make out three voices now as he creeps down the hall, his bare feet silent against the linoleum. He pauses just outside the front door, his breathing shallow, and listens.

“Hell might not wait.” It’s a man’s voice, deep but soft.

“Then it won’t wait,” Sam answers. 

“Half a century on earth is - ”

“I’m well aware. Now if you’ll excuse me for just a moment, it seems your shouting woke my brother.” Dean jumps at the sound of the doorknob turning, and he takes a step back with half a mind to duck into the kitchen, but he knows he won’t be quick enough. 

“Dean,” Sam says through the screen. “Come on out here, I’ll introduce you.”

Sam guides him down the concrete steps with a hand to his lower back. The old porch light flickers occasionally, forcing him to squint as his eyes adjust. Sitting in the grass with his legs crossed and his hands spread wide is Andrew, wearing his little blonde hiker like it’s his favorite dress. 

“Hey there, Deano.” 

Dean nods and turns to the man standing just far enough from the light to fade into the shadows. He’s dressed in a black and white suit, distinctly out of place in the shabby exterior of their home. His hands are clasped in front of him like an old photograph of a southern senator. 

“Dean Winchester,” he says through gritted teeth.

“Dean,” Sam says, taking a step forward. “This is Gusion.”

“Gus,” Dean says immediately and Andrew’s smile spreads like an oil slick.

“Gus,” he repeats. “Oh, I do think that will stick.”

“We’re having a scheduling meeting,” Sam continues. “Gusion is concerned that we’ll lose our chance at the throne if we continue to put things off.”

Andrew tilts his head back towards the stars. “Gus has always been preoccupied with time.”

Dean’s feet are bare and quickly going numb against the concrete. No one else seems to feel the cold, but he has to cross his arms to keep himself from shivering. “What kind of timetable are we looking at?”

“Yours,” Gus spits, before Sam can get a word in. “Apparently.” 

Andrew watches him with a look of scandalized delight, but Sam doesn’t take the bait. “That’s right,” he says calmly. “Our timetable is whatever we want it to be.” 

Dean looks Gus up and down and wonders what kind of pedestal he holds in hell. “Realistically,” he asks, meeting his black eyes. “How long do we have?”

“It’s impossible to say.”

“Give me something to work with here, buddy.”

He doesn’t move much at all except to re-clasp his hands. “We have five years to hold the odds on our side.” 

Dean watches Andrew tug at the dew covered grass. “And after five years?”

“Our odds decrease considerably.” Gus glances over Dean’s shoulder, continuing his earlier conversation with Sam. “At ten years, I can guarantee little. At twenty, nothing.”

“I’m not looking for a guarantee,” Sam says as he rests a hand on Dean’s shoulder, speaking more to Dean than their little audience of two. “All I need is a foothold to work with. And no matter how much time goes by, we’ll always have that much.”

“I’m already going to hell, Sammy,” Dean reminds him, a little breathless from the cold and the tightness in his chest.

“I think Dean and I should continue this conversation inside, where it’s at least slightly warmer. Andras, Gusion, we’ll speak soon.” He doesn’t wait for either of them to reply before he’s steering Dean back up the front steps, allowing the screen door to clatter closed behind them. 

“Sorry,” he whispers, plastering himself to Dean’s back and folding his arms across his chest. “But you should’ve worn a jacket.”

“Yeah, like I knew I was going to be dragged outside into your little board meeting,” Dean grunts. 

Sam hums into his ear. “Let me make it up to you.” 

“I thought we had a conversation to continue.”

Sam stills for a moment, his lips to the side of Dean’s neck, before he pulls away. “You know I’d never let you go alone.”

Dean’s still shivering, barefoot in the hallway. “Can anyone down there - can they stop you?” 

“No,” Sam says, and Dean hears it as a promise. “They can’t. Now come on, let’s go back to bed.” 

—

Bobby calls and calls, but Dean never answers. Sam glances over his shoulder at the name written in black text across the little screen of his phone. He presses an apologetic kiss to the inside of his throat. The tip of Sam’s nose is cold and Dean shrugs him off as he flips the phone closed and sends it sliding across the counter.

“Maybe you should answer one of these days,” Sam says. 

“And say what?” He asks as Sam catches his palm and threads their fingers together. 

“The truth,” Sam says. “That you still love him and you’re sorry to disappoint him.” 

“No,” Dean breathes. “I already said my goodbyes.” 

“He might understand,” he says, ducking down to pull on his tennis shoes. “You always have loved me too much.”

“It’s fine,” he says, because he can’t quite stomach the thought of Bobby’s voice right now. “This is fine.” 

Sam watches him for a long moment, before rapping his knuckles on the door frame as he steps out for his run. Dean waits as the little analogue clock that’s tucked away on the top of the fridge flicks its minute hand, until he reckons Sam has had enough time to put a quarter of a mile between them. 

He rummages through the lower kitchen cabinets for a dusty tupperware container and collects every burner phone left strewn across the house, powering them off to a mornful digital tune. He checks all the usual cracks and crevices, underneath the couch and the perches of windowsills, before shoving the overflowing container under the bed. The silence will do them both good, for a few days at least. 

—

May brings fog back to the mountains and Dean knows the heat will be sure to follow. Spring doesn’t waste any time like it does in the north, it settles in quick, and barely two weeks pass before Dean steps into the forest and all he sees is green. 

They’ve spent the last breath of winter lying low, spreading each other out on the cool linoleum of the kitchen floor and taking their fill. Dean hasn’t missed hunting and most days he’s learned to enjoy Nitro without the sun. But sometimes the impermanence of it all, the fleeting film of icy roads and Sam’s fingertips against his collarbones, freezes his heart cold.

Every breath is an exercise in appreciating what he has, in acknowledging that this life is temporary, and it leaves him gasping. 

So when Sammy lowers himself down onto Dean’s chest, and whispers into his ear that it’s time for them to get moving again, he’s ready.

—

“I found something in Ridgewood,” Sam says, jogging one foot up and down with latent energy. 

“Jersey?” He asks, barely awake over a cup of burnt coffee. 

“Pennsylvania, actually. Not far from one of our old schools.” 

Dean hums and takes a sip, thinking through his usual check-list of pre-hunt errands. “We can leave tonight. I should change my baby’s oil first and we can grab food from Institute if we still want to avoid big towns.”

“Probably the right move,” Sam agrees, smiling. With every passing day, he looks more and more otherworldly. Dean can’t put his finger on the change - he still looks like his little brother, but with static at his fingertips, a flush to his cheeks.

Once Dean packs up his tools and cleans his colt, he walks slowly from room to room, memorizing the sound of his steps along the creaking floorboards. He breathes in the smell of spring from the front door, natural to the east coast, earthy and sweet. “Sammy,” he calls, finally. “I’m ready.”

It’s already dark when they pull out onto the winding road that will lead them out of Nitro. Although there’s nothing but shadow in the rear-view mirror, Dean watches until they turn the corner. 

“With any luck we’ll be back by Tuesday,” Sam says.

Dean nods his head and turns up the radio. 

—

They stay in a little bed and breakfast for a night, because Sam thinks they’ll fall further under the radar that way. Hunters know their roadside motels, especially the ones that take cash and jot down a name with no need for a photo ID.

The house is an antique, old and riddled with holes barely covered by ancient wallpaper, pastels and floral print. It might be charming, under the right circumstances, but Dean longs for their little cabin home. 

Sam hovers over him once the bedside lamps have all been switched off and kisses him like he’s hungry for it. Dean allows him one lick into his open mouth before he presses his hands to his shoulders and says, “Maybe not tonight, Sammy.”

“You’re nervous,” Sam says, stretching out along his side.

Dean doesn’t answer. He can’t see anything in the dark, but he can feel Sam’s breath against his ear. 

“I told you, we don’t have to - ” 

“I know,” Dean says, cutting him off, his voice barely a whisper. “I know what you said. But I just can’t shake the feeling that we’ve started a stone rolling and it’s only gonna pick up speed from here.”

“I can stop it,” he promises. 

“I don’t need you to. I just need to simmer a bit, get used to my own thoughts.” Dean might be deadly in any number of situations, but he likes to think his real power is his ability to adjust. Every new border they crossed as children was kindling to Sam’s resentment, but Dean would flex and stretch and fit right in. He settled in to a life without Sam, he settled in to killing, to bloody fingernails and termites. He can do this, it just takes time.

“Alright,” Sam breathes with a chaste kiss to his cheek. “Alright.” 

—

They kill a wraith too quickly in the wing of a hospital closed for renovations. Its true face shows, grotesque and rotting, once Dean snaps off the bone spurs it used to feed. Sam’s patience wears thin soon after. 

They kept the lights off to avoid any unwanted attention, despite the ‘Danger’ signs posted on the doors, and Sam rides him slow and steady to the glow of a flashlight pointed idly against bare drywall. 

The tacky film of blood on his hands has left Dean’s mind numb and his body open to bask in whatever pleasure Sam is willing to give him. And he always does, never holding anything back, a true hedonist, as if their daddy never lifted a finger to raise them. Sam’s hands are braced on his chest, his fingernails digging sharp into his skin. The bite is enough to tip him over the edge and Sam moans when he feelings him coming. 

“I know you’re sick for Nitro, but it better not be those damn mountains you worship, Dean,” he gasps, his head tilted back. “It’d better be me.”

—

They’re already back in the little bed and breakfast when Sam holds up a cellphone. It’s perhaps the only one that survived Dean’s little afternoon purge, one of Sam’s that he keeps tucked inside his hunting bag. 

It has one message from Bobby, dated three hours earlier. _They know where you are. Get out and don’t go back._

Sam soothes him with a hand down his shoulder blade. “We better pack up. Good thing we left the body, or we might not have seen this for hours still.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, his mouth dry.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. We’ll be able to go home before you know it.” No sooner are the words out of his mouth when the sounds of splintering wood echo from down the stairs, followed by the startled scream of old Mrs. Estes. He hears indistinct shouting and he lunges for his bag. 

“Fuck,” he hisses, struggling with the zipper, cursing every failure of instinct that led him to pack his weapons away when they left the hospital. 

“Dean,” Sam says, sliding the safety off just as their door swings open, the lock torn from the wall. 

The room erupts in the patter of gunfire and he turns just in time to see a man fall in the doorway, bleeding out. Sam stands with one hand clutching thin air, veins bulging at his temples and the second man dies slow. He spends an agonizing minute fighting for oxygen, struggling to take a step. Sam waits until his eyes stare empty at the ceiling before he rushes to Dean’s side, laying him down on the blue knit carpet and whispering his name over and over again.

“Oh,” Dean gasps, suddenly unable to breathe, staring down at the two bullet holes torn through the fabric of his coat. The hole in his stomach should be leaking pain like gastric acid, but he doesn’t really feel much at all. Sam is next to him, cradling his cheeks, blood smeared across his face. He looks beautiful and wild eyed and Dean won’t look away.

“It’s okay,” Sam says, licking the blood from Dean’s fingertips, pulling them into his mouth one by one. “This just speeds things up a bit.” 

The shock is setting in, Dean begins to shiver in the start of summer heat. He watches as Sam checks the magazine in his Browning, before sliding it back into place. “But Dean, you’ve gotta listen to me.” He’s tilting his head back, watching him closely. “You have to wait for me. I’ll only be a second, barely that. I’ll be right behind you.”

Dean nods, hardly a jerk of his chin, because he knows Sam won’t hesitate when he holds that gun to his own head. He wonders how long a second is in hell, he wonders if it’s an eternity. 

“I’ll find you.” Sam is slumped over him, his lips moving along his cheeks, pressing desperate, open mouthed kisses against his skin. “I’ll find you and then we’ll make it ours.” 

When Sam was a child in small-town Wisconsin he would run from room to room in a cape fashioned from a moth eaten afghan and a crown of paperclips strung across his brow. Dean made him a sceptre out of the fallen branch of an old beech tree, and Sam held the tip to his shoulder, declaring him the king’s most trusted knight.

He smiles and tastes blood. “Long live,” he says, his voice gone to the pull of blood loss.

Sam kisses his trembling lips, the corners of his eyes. “We will,” he says. “We’ll live forever. I love you.”

He feels the cool edge of gun metal against his temple, but Dean doesn’t close his eyes. Instead he looks up at the pealing white peaks of ceiling tile and he imagines the stifling, mid-August heat of Nitro. It’s humid and fit to bake, throwing the asphalt into a haze of heatwaves, blurring the horizon line. 

Sam’s lips are moving against the palm of his hand, slack in his brother’s grip, but Dean can’t hear his voice. Instead he hears the mechanical tick of cicadas, wind whispering through tall grass, and watches the shadow of his brother stretched long against the bubbling pavement. 

The road turns to tar at his feet and Dean reaches down to dip his hand in, to watch it drip, heavy and hot, burning his fingers with the weight of it. 

He has known since the day Sam was born that his brother deserved a kingdom, and as the dry grass along the horizon of Nitro, West Virginia burns red with the setting sun, Dean thinks that he never could’ve imagined anything so perfect.


End file.
